‘The Station’ Cannes Review: Survival and Struggle in Yemen’s Civil War

Set in a remote village in Yemen—a country on the Arabian Peninsula, just across the Red Sea from Africa and long fractured by civil war—The Station follows Layal and her younger brother Laith as they try to survive in a world shaped almost entirely by conflict. Most of the men are gone, either fighting on the front lines or already dead, leaving behind a community largely made up of women. Life is precarious: money is scarce, tensions run high, and rival factions are never far away.

Against that backdrop, Layal has carved out something that initially feels almost miraculous: a fragile oasis in the middle of chaos. She runs a modest gas station—a rare, functioning space in a collapsing economy—but it quickly becomes clear that it’s more than just a place to refuel. It’s a social hub, a temporary refuge, a space where a different set of rules applies.

Layal enforces those rules with quiet determination. She only serves women, forbids political arguments, and tries to maintain the station as a “safe space” insulated from the violence surrounding it. At first, it even feels liberating: women remove their veils, joke, talk openly about sex, and enjoy fleeting moments of normalcy. But that sense of sanctuary proves increasingly illusory, as both religious pressure and military realities begin to close in.

The film’s central conflict emerges gradually but decisively. Layal is determined to keep her twelve-year-old brother from being conscripted. In many parts of war-torn Yemen, boys his age are at risk of recruitment by armed groups, and she needs money to secure his exemption. Her usual argument—that he is the only surviving male in the family after their father and older brother were killed in combat—no longer carries weight.

Desperate, she reaches out to her estranged older sister, Shams, asking for an advance on Laith’s share of the family inheritance. Shams doesn’t have the money either, but she makes a risky choice: she travels across dangerous territory, passing through multiple checkpoints to reunite with them, determined to come up with a plan. What follows is a tense, increasingly unpredictable chain of events in which nothing goes as expected and pressure mounts from all sides.

It’s true that The Station sometimes feels like it could benefit from a crash course in Yemeni geopolitics—alliances, factions, and motivations can be difficult to parse—but the emotional core remains clear. Both sisters, despite their differences, are united by a single goal: to prevent Laith—a vulnerable boy more interested in playing with a lizard than in anything resembling warfare—from being swallowed by a conflict he barely understands.

Director Sara Ishaq, who was born in Yemen and later settled in Scotland, first encountered stories like this during a visit to her homeland. She initially set out to document them, but the same political constraints depicted in the film made that impossible. Instead, she crafted this fiction, rooted in real events, as a way of capturing something deeper: the resilience, determination, and sheer survival instinct of women forced to navigate—and hold together—a society fractured by war.

This is no gentle feminist parable. Some women oppose Layal, others enforce strict religious norms, and divisions within the group run deep. Yet as The Station gradually shifts from intimate family drama into something closer to a war thriller, it becomes increasingly clear where its convictions lie: without the persistence and ingenuity of these women, not just this village—but perhaps much more—would have collapsed long ago.