On the evening of July 26, 1909, the first silent film was shown outdoors in Baghdad. In 1911, the place became known as Cinema Baluki, named after the Iraqi Jewish merchant who imported the equipment and the films. Beginning with the owner of Cinema Baluki, many Iraqi Jews invested in film exhibition infrastructure and technology. This paper explores the history of the Iraqi cinema industry between 1909 – the year the first permanent cinema was built in Baghdad and 1951 – the year when the majority of Iraqi Jews were forced to leave. In the 1940s and early 1950s, the Jewish Sawda’i family pioneered the construction of cinemas, import of films, and established Iraq’s first film studio, Studio Baghdad. Before they began investing in cinema, the three Sawda’i brothers, Ezra, Me’ir, and Hayyawi, had made their fortune through a silicate brick factory, which they co-owned. National narratives of cinema have a tendency to write out the involvement and contributions of those with hybrid identities. In the case of Iraq, many accounts have obscured the role of Iraqi Jews in the cinema industry’s first four decades. This paper investigates the historical entanglement of capital, culture, and leisure by mapping the local Iraqi capitalist and entrepreneurial elites, many of whom were upper-class Iraqi Jews with international outlooks, who invested in exhibition and production technology. More specifically, by focusing on the Sawda’i brothers, this paper interrogates networks, connections, and the circulation of cultural products and material objects, including films, equipment, and technology and asks how these came together at a particular historical moment with capital, performers, and people with technical skills to establish a film industry in Iraq. The paper adds to the growing scholarship on film histories in the Global South that challenges purely national frameworks and engages creatively with the lack of film texts and archives. In addition, this paper examines the Iraqi cinema industry through its networks of affiliation not only with cinema in other countries, such as Egypt, but also with other emerging capitalist industries in Iraq. By complicating national frameworks, the paper recovers the role of Iraqi Jews and the transregional connections that constituted the early film industry in Iraq. This paper uses previously unconsidered primary materials, including Arabic and Hebrew archival records, fiction and poetry, photography, periodicals, memoirs, personal accounts by Iraqis involved in the cinema industry, and the personal archives of the Sawda’i family now living in Israel.