Although not widely known, Mohamed Bayoumi was one of the great pioneers of Egyptian cinema. Born in Tanta in 1894, Bayoumi left Egypt in 1920 to study filmmaking in Berlin. When he returned in 1923, he created his own newsreel and proceeded to shoot a series of short films. In this paper, I examine one of Bayoumi’s earliest films and its depictions of Egypt. Specifically, I analyze Bayoumi’s comic Barsoum yabhath ‘an wazifa/Barsoum Looks for a Job and the ways in which it articulated his personal vision of the Egyptian nation four years after the 1919 revolution. Research on Bayoumi’s work is minimal at best. Although a handful of scholars have examined the cultural significance of contemporary Egyptian cinema, film theorists and historians largely ignore the silent era. Nationalist historians, for instance, dismiss silent film production because Egyptianized Europeans (mutamassirun) dominated cinematic output before the establishment of an indigenous film industry in the early 1930s. As a result, few scholars have seriously examined the centrality of silent film in producing foundational images of Egyptian nationalism. I therefore revisit Bayoumi’s pioneering work and ask why he created new imaginaries that both built upon and transcended older ideas of Egypt as an idea and a place. Barsum represents Bayoumi’s first stand-alone directorial effort and laid the foundation for many of the social themes that later filmmakers would address. I therefore focus on how he stages popular understandings of poverty, comedy, and relations between Copts and Muslims. Taken as a whole, Bayoumi’s work represents not only a shift in silent filmmaking, but also a break from decades of short documentaries that recorded ‘authentic’ social realities and landmarks. For these reasons, I situate Barsum within a framework that foregrounds its importance in early formulations of post-revolutionary nationalism.