In this paper, I argue that one of the most important ways of understanding the First World War in Egypt is through the so-called ‘silent’ films taken of the laborers who joined the war. With the representation of Egyptian workers and the Egyptian Labour Corps (ELC) as my focus, I offer a theoretical and methodological framework that aims to broaden scholarly understandings of the war, the transnational nature of filmmaking, and the development of cinematic idioms that transcend purely nationalist imaginaries. Broadly speaking, we need more scholarly research on multimedia portrayals of the First World War in Egypt. While a number of photographs, paintings, and artwork of the ELC exist, I examine film because of its widespread use between 1915 and 1918. Specifically, I look at one black and white 1917 film, “An Egyptian Labour Contingent,” created by the War Office Cinema Committee and the Topical Film Company. With a focus on this film, I aim to fill some of the research gaps about Egyptian cinema during this period and how film technology helped to create new visual/aural vocabularies of the war. I likewise address what film can teach us about representations of Egyptian laborers by shifting the focus away from the politicians and military commanders who directed the war effort. To make sense of the experience of the laborers who served, I consider the ways in which colonial film depicted their lives and what effect these depictions had on official understandings of their wartime contributions. From a visual/aural perspective, “An Egyptian Labour Contingent” represented a significant shift from older uses of cinema that attempted to document the land of Ancient Egypt and its inhabitants. Recognizing the differences between prewar and wartime representations of Egypt, I draw on colonial film as a medium that not only comprises dialectic elements, but also one that can help us to reframe historical and historiographical questions related to the production, consumption, and distribution of images featuring subaltern Egyptians.