Togo Mizrahi (1901-1986), an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, was one of the pioneers of the Egyptian film industry. He founded a studio and a production company in 1929, and became a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals. Between 1930 and 1946, Togo Mizrahi directed thirty full-length feature films in Arabic, and four Greek-language films. In his day, Togo Mizrahi was viewed by his peers and by critics as a consummate professional who contributed to the drive to establish a cinema industry in Egypt. In the midst of the Egyptian anti-colonial struggle, the development of a local cinema industry was embraced as a source of national pride for filmmakers, critics, and audiences alike. Togo Mizrahi, I argue, saw himself as engaged in this collective effort. His contemporaries heralded his contributions to building a national film industry. But, later critics dismissed Mizrahi’s contributions to the development of Egyptian cinema. From their perspective Togo Mizrahi had three strikes against him: he was a capitalist; he was a foreigner; and he was Jew. Drawing upon archival research in contemporaneous journals and newspapers, I demonstrate Togo Mizrahi’s contributions to the nationalist project of establishing Egyptian cinema as both a local art form and a vital domestic industry. I argue that Togo Mizrahi’s films articulate both a pluralist nationalism and an Arabophone, locally situated cosmopolitanism. The title of this talk comes from a scene in Mizrahi’s 1937 film al-cIzz Bahdala [Mistreated by Affluence] that explores these idioms. The film follows the friendship of Chalom, a Jew, and 'Abdu, a Muslim, who start out impoverished and rapidly climb the socio-economic ladder together, only to return to their modest circumstances after a fall. When Chalom graduates from hawking lottery tickets on the streets to renting a store front, he hangs a bilingual sign in Arabic and French. In Arabic, the sign reads “Chalom, for the sale and redemption of lottery tickets.” The broken French—mimicking the common signs for currency exchange in the port city—reads “Chalom, agent of exchange.” The notion of exchange—from cultural exchange to exchange of identities—is a key element of what I identify as a Levantine cinematic idiom evident in Togo Mizrahi’s films. My analyses of Mizrahi’s films tease out the relationship between the notion of exchange, pluralist nationalism, and locally situated cosmopolitanism.