Film noir represents a cinematic discourse (rather than a genre) that once dominated American Cinema and communicated post-WWII pessimism. As American Cinema and World Wars have a global echo, film noir elements traveled across the globe. While it never managed to represent itself as an established genre in Egypt, noir sensibilities first appeared in Egyptian films after Egypt’s political independence from British colonialism in 1952, thus a more hopeful time than the American war context. However, a more pessimistic “new wave” of noir films, or “neo-noir,” emerged after Egypt’s 1967 military defeat. This lecture analyzes film noir elements—e.g. urban crime, murder, and gender-based violence—in Egyptian Cinema and contrasts how they were first weaponized after independence and later after the defeat of the Third Worldist, anti-colonial, and socialist state. In this lecture, I examine noir aesthetics as a post-independence discourse in realist films, such as: Youssef Chahine’s Cairo Station (1958) and Kamal al-Shaykh’s adaptation of Naguib Mahfuz’s The Thief and the Dogs (1962). I then examine the same elements as a post-war discourse in post-1967 noir films from different genres Despite their different genres, these films reflect a conscious use of noir aesthetics and politics that communicate critiques of the political, intellectual, and social climate of their times. In addition to analyzing these films as “noir,” I also advance a reading of the films as “neo,” mainly for revisiting the conventions of “old” films and communicating revisionist discourses. By analyzing these neo/noir elements—as a discourse rather than a genre—in the context of Egyptian aesthetics and politics, this lecture explores the criteria that make a genre, a sub-genre, or a cinematic movement “new” and highlights the (inter)textual relation between genres, historical contexts, cultural climates, and political critique.