Translation is traditionally seen as the transparent, innocent transmission of information from one language and culture to another. However, translation can also become a means of flattening and controlling what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls the "rhetoricity" of less powerful languages and cultures, engendering " a species of neocolonialist construction of the non-Western scene." This dynamic problematizes the liberal notion that translation necessarily promotes reciprocal intercultural understanding. Rather, translation often becomes an apparatus for perpetuating cultural hegemony. According to Moroccan literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito, who traces the genealogy of Arabic literary traditions that have tended to self-translate into Western literary norms at the expense of Arabo-Islamic genres, "To speak a language necessitates turning to one side. Language is tied to a location on the map or to a given space." While he treats the history of translation in Arabic literature, Kilito's argument also suggests means and themes of productive critique in Arab cinema. Meanwhile, as Algerian historian, novelist and filmmaker Assia Djebar has pointed out, translation is also highly gendered. The violence and betrayal lurking in acts of translation across historically contingent power differentials can also apply to patriarchal translations of and through women. Djebar suggests a new kind of resistance to translation when she insists on the idea of "listening to" her literary subjects rather than "speaking for" them. My paper discusses how two different Maghrebi films with Moroccan and Tunisian female protagonists theorize critiques of and through translation. First, I discuss the 1989 film by Moroccan screenwriter and director Farida Benlyazid, Bab al-sama' maftuh [A Door to the Sky / Gateway to Heaven] (1989), which portrays a woman's rebellion against self-translation into French idioms. Marshaling her command of textual Qur'anic and Sufi traditions, the heroine "untranslates" Moroccan female selfhood. Second, I discuss Tunisian director Nadia El Fani's Bedwin Hacker (2003), which foregrounds translation to interrupt European concepts of time, history, and gendering of the Maghreb. In insisting on the figure of woman beyond the colonial paradigm, these two very different films point to the ethical problems of various translational regimes. Resisting translation that would require a neocolonial version of "turning to one side," Benlyazid and El Fani instead point to the "untranslation" of Maghrebi spaces that hinges, problematically and productively, on the figure of woman.