While the development of an ambitious film industry in Egypt is now well known, its international expansion has drawn less attention. However, Egyptian films long were the only Arabic-language films proposed to Arab populations under the colonial yoke. Even though they made their first appearance on Maghrebi screens by the early 1930s, their rarity turned the screenings into huge events, drawing a new spectatorship (notably, families) to cinema theatres. Over the past few years, scholars have begun to investigate the political aspects of these screenings in the French Empire, highlighting the fear, close to paranoia, that these films raised in the colonial administration, and the heavy censorship that ensued. My aim is to present a more comprehensive study of the circulation of Egyptian cinema in colonial Maghreb, by considering not only the political, but also the social and economic dimensions of this trade. I will focus on distributors and cinema owners who are too often forgotten or disregarded in the cinema history, and on the actual expertise they developed for films commonly scorned by French and Maghrebi elites. My research relies on administrative archives, press, interviews and memoirs, but I make also use of new sources such as printed song lyrics and the private archives of the distributor Films Régence. The trade of Egyptian films developed in an already precarious environment, which characterized the whole film industry in colonial North Africa. Alongside a few ambitious firms like Films Régence (which extended its trade to Sub-Saharan Africa and did not hesitate to invest in production in Egypt), regularly on the verge of bankruptcy, many distributors only ran small-scale businesses. I will deal with the various obstacles erected by French authorities to impede the distribution of Egyptian films and demonstrate that the colonial administration’s main concern was to obstruct direct commercial relations between Egypt and the Maghreb. Precarity also characterized the business of film exhibition. I will give an overview of cinema owners in North Africa and examine the part that Maghrebi Jews, and an increasing number of Muslims, played in the success of Egyptian films. The major issue here lied within the specialization of a few cinemas in Egyptian films, which the French authorities regarded as an act of political dissidence. Whether on a political, economic or cultural level, Egyptian cinema presented an opportunity for cinematographic independence in French North Africa, in a context that hindered the birth of national cinemas.