In Al Mahattah, Layal, played by actress Manal Al Mulaiki, runs a women-only petrol station in Yemen, a safe haven in a war-torn country. There, the rules are simple: no men, no weapons, no politics. When Layal’s younger brother (Rashad Khaled) faces enlistment, she reunites with her estranged sister (Abeer Mohamed) to save the one life they still can.
Selected in Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival, The Station by Yemeni-Scottish Sara Ishaq unfolds as a work of quiet urgency, rooted in the fractured geography of contemporary Yemen and anchored in an intimate story of separation, survival, and sorority.
Rather than approaching war through its front lines, Ishaq, in her first fiction feature, portrays its domestic effects: families split across territories, gender roles reshaped amid economic collapse, and the emotional cost of holding a family together when the country itself is divided. The film resists explanation; instead, it observes how people continue to live, love, work, and protect one another in conditions that should make all three nearly impossible.
At the film's heart lies a deeply human and tightly interwoven story: two sisters living on opposite sides of a fractured Yemen, in territories controlled by opposing forces. Between them stretches not only a military and political divide, but also a daily logistical impossibility: checkpoints, danger, and the constant uncertainty of movement.
Yet the story is not built around separation alone. It is structured around resistance to separation. Despite their distance, the two sisters remain bound by a shared responsibility: their younger brother. In a country where young men are routinely pulled into armed conflict, conscription, or survival-based recruitment, the sisters insist he will not be sent to war—each for their own reasons.
This refusal forms the emotional backbone of the film. It is not framed as ideology, but as protection. As Ishaq situates it, the story is less about political positioning than about the intimate negotiations of survival inside families stretched by violence. What emerges is a portrait of women who do not share the same physical space but who operate as a single moral unit. The distance between them becomes the condition of their collaboration.
Capturing complexities
Ishaq never wanted to make the film to map Yemen for an international audience. On the contrary, she is adamant about resisting that route. When asked about why she thought Yemen was so opaque to global audiences, often told the situation was ‘too complex’, she immediately explains “Obviously Yemen has a complex history, the geopolitics and the yemeni social structure are are very complicated as well but I think it’s also a way to disguise what’s happening in Yemen to say—well it’s too complicated, you don’t understand what’s happening—but actually it’s very simple and I wanted to keep that focus," she tells Al Majalla.
"Trying to explain everything is also risking oversimplifying; I would have to make a series with many episodes to go into the various aspects of it all, and I don’t want to do that! I don’t want to be a scholar,” she explains. “I don’t want to teach the audience the geopolitics of my country.”
Instead, she insists on the importance of emotional truth over informational clarity. The film deliberately avoids becoming a guide to the Yemeni conflict. Its focus is not explanation but lived experience.
“I wanted to focus on the authenticity of human stories with a Yemeni flavour,” she explains.
In this sense, the film avoids the temptation of exposition. It does not attempt to summarise Yemen for external audiences. It does not translate its reality into geopolitical diagrams. It stays with the texture of life as it is lived: fragmented, adaptive, emotionally dense.
This is also where her artistic position becomes clear. She is not interested in positioning herself as an interpreter of conflict, but as an observer of how people inhabit it. This decision shapes the entire structure of the film. Political reality is present, but never foregrounded as discourse. Instead, it appears indirectly—through the absence of jobs, the fragmentation of families, the shifts in gender roles, and the way daily life reorganises itself under pressure.
Suspended lives
The backdrop to the film is Yemen, a country where war has extended over more than a decade, reshaping every layer of society. Economic collapse, institutional fragmentation, and displacement have become structural conditions rather than temporary disruptions.
But Ishaq resists turning this reality into abstract catastrophe. Instead, she focuses on how it alters the most basic unit of society: the household. One of her most striking observations concerns the collapse of male employment and its emotional consequences. “The men that I saw were very shaken at the beginning of the war,” she explains, describing how the loss of jobs destabilised not only income but identity itself.
“In a society where your value as a man is determined by how much money you can bring in, being a breadwinner,” she says, “when men weren’t able to do that because they had lost their jobs... things became very challenging for society at large.”
Her observation is grounded in concrete economic collapse: teachers, doctors, NGO workers, and civil servants losing salaries, sometimes for years at a time. “People were going through their savings, and the ones who were already poor were falling into devastating living conditions," she says.
