Since its inception in the early twentieth century, the Egyptian film industry depended solely upon private capital to finance its development and expansion. This private character of film production began to falter when the Egyptian government established the Cinema Support Institution in 1957, officially marking the birth of the public sector in Egyptian cinema—a state body charged to support, financially or technically, manage, and aid the film industry. In 1960, the same institution acquired the appropriate means to propel its venture into film production, signaling the emergence of public-sector film production—the state’s direct involvement in the film industry as a producer, distributor, and theater owner—, only to end eleven years later in 1971. By presenting a comprehensive, chronological and nuanced assessment of the public sector in Egyptian cinema, this paper seeks to shed some light on the multilayered circumstances under which the said sector emerged, expanded, and eventually brought to an end. Between an impending birth and a predestined death, deterministic analyses prevail in the study of the public sector in Egyptian cinema, the outcome of which is none other than general confusion. To many historians and film critics, the establishment of this sector was inexorable in a society experiencing an overall drift to socialism, attributing its emergence mostly to a premeditated set of ideological elements. The collapse of this sector, however, is strongly assumed by some scholars to have been predetermined by birth defects, namely, the absence of a clear ideological agenda. From this frequently repeated narrative of the rise and fall of the public sector in Egyptian cinema, the socio-political and economic implications of unforeseen events, such as the Tripartite Aggression in 1956, the political tension between Egypt and some Arab countries from the late 1950s onwards, the defeat of 1967, Nasser’s death in 1970, and al-Sadat’s Corrective Revolution, are typically ignored. By incorporating these seemingly unrelated influences into the story of the public film sector, this paper argues that many state decisions concerning cinema affairs were not part of a preplanned, purely ideologically-driven strategy, but rather pragmatic, somewhat experimental, responses to the many ramifications of the ever-changing realities that Egypt was witnessing at the time.