From 1953 to 1963, Danish archaeologist Peter V. Glob led a series of expeditions to the Middle East, especially Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. Famously interdisciplinary, Glob’s expeditionary team included not just archaeologists, anthropologists, and assyriologists, but also painters, poets, photographers, and filmmakers. Indeed, the crew shot thousands of photographs and hundreds of hours of footage, some of which was made into films, books, and exhibits only much later, sometimes as late as the 1990s. The expeditionary footage from Bahrain (taken between 1953 and 1959), for example, eventually became DILMUN, a documentary released in 1967. The footage from Kuwait (shot between 1958 and 1963) became HER ER KUWAIT (Here Is Kuwait), released in 1968. The films themselves are hybrids of several genres: part expeditionary film, part educational film, part industrial film for the oil companies, part flag-waving commercial for the Gulf state depicted. While BEDUINER (1962), a documentary about Qatar's Bedouin tribes, hews most closely to its original scientific footage, DILMUN and HER ER KUWAIT drift more toward travelogue. How do we explain these films in relation to the scientific mission, the needs of the host countries, and the Danish context? This paper argues that these films neatly, even poetically express the conflicting forces shaping a "global Middle East." As they try to pay attention to their scientific task, their vision is also split between the Gulf states' emerging nationhood and Denmark's own nationalistic investment in exploration. The confusion of genres expresses the variety of contradictory demands imposed on the films and filmmakers from not only the sponsoring countries and corporations, but also the expectations of the Danish audience. Each Gulf state latched upon the expeditions themselves as opportunities for nation-building, yet the finished films have an uneasy legacy within each state’s own national tale. Qatar, for example, is currently building a national museum, but BEDUINER’s role in the current national narrative, although undeniable (as the only extant footage of Bedouins), is still undecided and debated. This paper draws upon archival sources and original analysis of the films, as well as published scholarship, to explain the often-fraught relationship between film, nation, and science in the Middle East. While the paper specifically explores this relationship, its findings also speak to broader debates about the challenges of nation-building, the (re)construction of history and myth, and the influence of the external world on the Arab states of the Gulf.