In his film A Thousand Months (2003), Moroccan filmmaker Faouzi Bensaidi highlights corrupt Moroccan institutions during the so-called Years of Lead, a period lasting from the 1960s through the 1980s that was marked by state violence. Bensaidi’s recent film Volubilis (2018) revisits the same theme in the post-Arab Spring era, while also highlighting issues of social class and the conflicting ideologies of Islam and globalization. Volubilis exposes the hegemonic gaze of the elite as a political mechanism of power and violence that terrorizes the working class. It highlights the interplay of trauma and socioeconomic oppression by featuring a newlywed Moroccan couple, and describes how the oppressive dynamics of the corrupt system lead to the breakdown of their relationship. Abdelkader is a security guard who is asked by the mall officials to prevent low-class visitors from using the escalator. My paper examines how the mall functions as a form of social closure, where low-class visitors are vetted and excluded from public space. For Pierre Bourdieu, the analysis of public space centers on class, since divisions within classes can be reflected in public spaces. The class habitus produces a division that affects participation in consumption practices. While the mall escalator acts as a means of social exclusivity for the dominant classes and operates as a means of control of the working classes, it also allows some potential of mobility. The paper also argues that Volubilis is a trauma film in which the stronger take their revenge on the poor. Abdelkader is kidnapped and subjected to torture for mistakenly preventing the wife of an elite official from accessing the escalator. His torture and trauma act as vehicles for awakening nostalgia for the past as an escape from the present. The protagonist’s trauma emerges in nostalgic encounters, as he wanders the ruins of Volubilis, an ancient Roman city outside the Moroccan city of Meknes. Cathy Caruth argues that trauma is “not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature returns to haunt the survivor.” While my paper engages with Caruth’s trauma theory and Bourdieu’s class theory, it also critiques their Eurocentric dimensions, as it offers a new understanding of class dynamics in Morocco in the post-Arab Spring era.