Togo Mizrahi was a pioneering director, producer, and actor in the Egyptian film industry and was largely responsible for making cosmopolitan Alexandria, his birthplace, a center of film production. Born in Alexandria in 1901, Mizrahi grew up in Egypt but maintained Italian nationality; he spent the greater part of the 1920s as a student in Italy and France.

Mizrahi returned to Alexandria in 1928 and the following year founded the Egyptian Films Company. That same year he opened the Bacos Studio, a converted theater in Alexandria, and made films there …