This film is based on a novel from 1947 by the Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz. The story takes place during WWII and focuses on Al-Madak Alley, a teeming back street in Cairo which is presented as the microcosm of the world. A barber is in love with a young poor girl, who lives with her mother, and gets a job in an English Army camp to earn enough money for their marriage. But he is not the only one who wants to marry this girl and when the barber returns, she is gone.

A poor peasant woman becomes a symbol of worker oppression in this somber social drama directed by Henri Barakat. Azziza (Faten Hamama) is brutally raped by a guard when she goes into the fields to gather potatoes for her husband (Abdallah Gheiss). She does not relate the incident to her husband who is suffering from an undisclosed illness. Azziza hides the pregnancy and strangles the baby after it is born, but she also dies soon thereafter. The migrant workers rally around her memory as she becomes a martyr to the cause of the struggling peasants.