Nouri Bouzid is the doyen of Tunisian cinema. Not only was he involved in every major postcolonial film, whether as a screenwriter, scriptwriter or even actor, but he singlehandedly directed more than half-a-dozen films, each of which enjoyed wide national and international acclaim. Perhaps because of his firsthand experience of prison and torture for five years under the ancien régime of Habib Bourguiba, Nouri Bouzid’s cinematographic passion has centered on staging defeated and broken individuals in search of human dignity, societal justice and political reckoning. For example, in his 1986 début feature film Rih essed (a.k.a Man of Ashes), he tackles the issue of child molestation and the ways in which a sexually abused apprentice carpenter grows into adulthood marked by the scandal of homosexuality and lack of manhood, which prompts him at the end to avenge himself against his molester, the boss carpenter. Similarly, in Akher film (aka Making of), he chronicles the fate of yet another defeated and broken individual (here a street break-dancer and something of a crook) whose pursuit of an illegal passage to Europe turns into a misguided pursuit of paradise and martyrdom at a time when the 2003 illegal British and US-led military campaign against Iraq was well under way, igniting feelings of shame, humiliation, and anger throughout the Arab world. The disoriented 25-year-old Bahta (Lotfi Abdelli) falls into the hands of a clandestine fundamentalist (intégriste) faction and is gradually indoctrinated into believing that the best thing he could do with his life is literally to blow it up for the sake of a guaranteed paradise and dozens of voluptuously beautiful houris, or young women. This paper will engage with the reverberations of the topoi of defeat, failure and impotence in Bouzid’s filmography in order to discern the counterintuitive strategies and visions of dissent his films present us with.