This essay mines the ambiguous divide between Egyptian and Egyptianized in discourses of the cinema, against those of the nation. The operative divide is one having to do with what I describe as nationalist credentials of cinema practitioners, institutions, and films. Some nationalist credentials could be and were pursued by such practitioners, such as in acquiring Egyptian citizenship, making “patriotic” movies, offering cinema programs in Arabic, or associating with highly credentialed nationalists. Other credentials, such as fluency in Arabic and, of course, origin—ethnic, religious, and national—were less attainable. Relying on popular press, cinema magazines, and government papers, I undertake an historical analysis of national identity, in a nation state barely formed, and still not entirely independent of its occupier Great Britain. Considering that fewer than thirty feature films had been produced domestically by the end of 1934, all were deemed nationalist by reviewers and critics of the day, in that they at minimum signified and participated in the modernization effort that the nation was undertaking, so as to catch up to the industrialized nations of the world. Yet, what was not missed on nationalist observers was the relatively high participation by non-Egyptians and Egyptianized in the making of these early Egyptian films. More lopsided than production was exhibition, in that a proportionally high number of cinemas were owned and run by Egyptianized and non-Egyptians, especially in the case of the relatively opulent first run cinemas. With the backgrounds—ethnic, religious, geographic—of cinema practitioners under scrutiny, particularly the powerful among them, Egyptianness of such practitioners itself was assessed for the sake of credentialing their cinematic work. Referencing GDP, literacy, and urbanism in Egypt of the modern era, I propose three problems of the reification of nationalism in modernity according to influential theorizing by Elie Kedouri, Earnest Gellner, and Benedict Anderson. Further, I dispute the nationalist credentials of “Egypt for the Egyptians,” the operative modern nationalist slogan, as I argue that Egyptianness was an elusive identity for many cinema practitioners living and born in Egypt, even following the actuation of the Citizenship Law of 1929, because of its ambiguity and its political currency.