This paper explores two growing trends in Jordan: Western movies, whether funded through major Hollywood studios or independently, that shoot in Jordan to capture similar terrain as the war-torn, revolutionary, and still unstable locations they wish to depict; and a small but growing market of local film production from and about the country itself. These developments encourage a more theoretical inquiry into the visualization of space on film. What exactly do we see when we watch a particular landscape activated in a movie? What happens when profilmic space, the city, countryside or studio in front of the camera, does not line up with the narrative of the film? In other words, what does it mean for one space to be dressed up as, to be asked to perform another? This critical conversation becomes especially vital in relation to Middle Eastern cinema or films made about or shot in the Middle East. Jordan, as a site of much recent filmic activity, provides a useful case study. The role-playing Jordan’s countryside and city centers perform on screen highlights the country’s complex national identity and as such necessitates an examination beyond the budgetary and safety concerns filmmakers cite for their location choices. If contemporary visual culture considers the ethics of photographing, displaying, and looking at human bodies, and particularly human bodies in pain, I advance in this paper a similar ethics of visualizing space that requires us to describe carefully the kinds of staging practices that produce the images we see on film. This practice departs from the current archive of cinema and space scholarship, which tends to focus on films representing or producing specific cities and places. I engage with and trouble theories of national cinema to argue that in the Middle Eastern context, the production and circulation of film reveals precisely the complex and often arbitrary nature of national borders. Finally, I turn my attention to a close reading of Annemarie Jacir’s recent Lamma Shofak (When I Saw You, 2013) to argue that this model of spatial visualizing allows viewers to recognize the places that haunt a film without ever appearing on screen, broadening our definition of a film’s setting. A sensitivity to this model allows scholars of cinema to address more thoroughly the imagined spaces and nostalgic histories that comprise a character’s relationship to space and the way an audience engages with what they see on screen.