This paper examines images of the U.S. in selected Egyptian films, with a focus on the work of master filmmakers, such as Youssef Chahine and Khaled Youssef, produced prior to and after 9/11. I will show that these filmmakers’ representations of the U.S., in fact, heavily respond to the images circulated in the U.S. mainstream media, which tends to equate Islam and Arabs with terrorism. The resulting Egyptian cinematic counter-narratives, such as, Chahine’s The Other (1999), directly address U.S. dominant perceptions of Islam, and correct it by locating the roots of our current crises not in Hollywood’s iconic referent to terrorism, namely a Middle-Eastern, Muslim, male person, but in a system of brutal capitalism, racism and growing inequalities. In these counter-narratives, the U.S. emerges as the embodiment of brutal capitalism and the atrocities it commits with its military might. U.S. power dominates their aesthetic work, which resents the current world configuration and seeks to resist it. Yet, by drawing on Hamid Dabashi’s insightful thoughts on how to move towards decolonizing our analytical apparatus, I argue that the corrective mode of these films fixates on the workings of U.S. power and turns the directors to combative speakers with the imperial U.S., which is their main interlocutor. I argue that by doing so, these films remain blind to the many discursive possibilities that could more effectively resist their object of resentment: U.S. power. By doing close readings of film scenes, I will point out the absences and elisions these films resort to and offer alternative interpretive frameworks. I intend to suggest in the conclusion that an Arabs-in-relation narrative or a migrant-workers-in-relation narrative, in the context of the films I deal with, might be much more defiant of the colonial manufactured boundaries that enable and secure consent for imperialism than the angry reaction to the U.S. dominant perceptions of the Arabs and Islam.