This paper investigates what I suggest is a new cinematic mode that emerged in the wake of the Arab Uprisings of 2011. In films such as Out on the Street (2014), by Egyptian filmmakers Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk, and Le Challat de Tunis (2013), by Tunisian director Kaouther ben Hania, techniques of classical documentary filmmaking are combined with more unusual choices, such as animation, improvisation, and subjective, lyrical sequences in the manner of what film theorist Bill Nichols calls the “poetic mode.” These techniques of fictional film depict scenes that veer away from traditional realism and show us moments where the hope and promise of the uprisings’ early successes has not yet faded. In Out on the Street, for example, we observe an acting improvisation workshop, in which former Egyptian factory workers enact a successful strike against their exploitative bosses. These scenes depict the Arab world, if only briefly, “as if” the uprisings had been successful. I argue that the effect of this hybrid documentary mode is to call into question the narrative—upheld both by official state narratives and the Western media–that the Arab uprisings were a failure. These scenes are still circumscribed, nonetheless, within a frank assessment of the Arab world’s contemporary challenges. Metwaly and Rizk show us footage of a factory, for instance, that is being stripped for parts by a foreign buyer, while ben Hania reveals the rampant sexism in Tunisian society through man-on-the-street interviews. In other words, these films do not serve as mere wish fulfillment. Rather, by virtue of the juxtaposition of realism with utopianism, these films ask us to reevaluate the criteria for what ‘success’ looks like. Drawing on scholars both of Middle Eastern film as well as of traditions of radical documentary cinema, this paper contributes to the growing body of work on art and media after the Arab uprisings.