This paper traces the genealogies of realism and modernism in Arab cinema from the 1950s onwards, working comparatively across the region and outside it to displace two persistent critical binaries: the opposition between Egyptian and other Arab cinemas, characterized by the former’s historical dominance and melodramatic form; and the opposition between Arab and European cinemas, by which Arab modernisms are often positioned negatively as derivative of European models. In the 1950s, some Egyptian filmmakers began to explore poverty and social problems using a style of realism hitherto unseen in Egypt. While Italian neorealism was undoubtedly one influence, these films did not resemble Rossellini or De Sica’s. Nor was their realism yoked to an anti-bourgeois or anti-imperialist cinematic voice, as was later the case with the neorealisms taken up by some cinema novo and Third Cinema proponents. While existing in tension with the conventions of Egyptian commercial cinema, which remained largely melodramatic, the realism of filmmakers like Salah Abu Seif, Tewfik Saleh, or Youssef Chahine was also a means to engage a global cultural modernity, similar to what Biswas has claimed in theorizing Indian cinema’s embrace of neorealism and literary modernism. In this sense, then, realism and modernism often emerged not as personal style but rather as part of larger cultural movements, and even became part of institutional arrangements. Salah Abu Seif's work, for example, was bound up with that of Naguib Mahfouz, the modernist novelist who also authored over twenty screenplays for Seif and others between 1947-59. Beyond Egypt, some North African filmmakers drew on these films as part of an Arab cinematic legacy while incorporating other influences, too. Moumen Smihi’s El Chergui (1975), for example, conjoins Satyajit Ray with Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” in which “modernism [is] shot through with realism” and vice versa (Rhodes 55). Retracing Arab realisms as restless engagements with global modernity rather than shallow derivation or generic play, this paper uses Egyptian and Arab films to rethink questions of modernism, realism, and genre in cinema. Bibliography: Biswas, Moinak. "In the Mirror of an Alternative Globalism: The Neorealist Encounter in India." In Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, edited by Laura E. Roberto and Kristi M. Wilson, 72-90. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007 Rhodes, John David. Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.