Many filmmakers in the Arab world have dealt with the fact that history in their regions is not well documented. Thus it is characteristic of their artworks to resort to idiosyncratic archives, personal memory, and, when memory fails, to fabulation, or inventing a past when documents and memory fail to testify to it. The intellectual genealogy of fabulation goes back long before Gilles Deleuze to Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn Ibn Sînâ and Sadr al-Dîn Muhammad al-Shirâzî Mullâ Sadrâ, and particularly to the concept of the imaginal realm developed by Mullâ Sadrâ and others (Jambet 2006). I will explore some of the creative strategies that this concept from eastern Islam offers for contemporary cinema. However, filmmakers who use these strategies sometimes encounter a problem, namely that their work is considered irresponsible, or held not to properly represent regional history. They may be charged with Western neo-liberalist individualism (El Shakry 2009), or just with irresponsibility. This talk will examine these dilemmas, in the case of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s 2008 film Je Veux Voir, in which the French star Catherine Deneuve plays herself, visiting Lebanon for the first time in 2006 and “wanting to see” the country as it reels from the Israeli-Hezbollah war. The film was well received outside Lebanon, but Lebanese critics responded with anger and frustration that the film was too pro-Israeli, or too pro-Hizbollah, or in other ways could not be appropriated to a political program. Considering Je Veux Voir as a work of fabulation, however, and one that creates historiography imaginally, allows us to appreciate its creative and political efficacy. References Omnia El Shakry, “Artistic Sovereignty in the Shadow of Post-Socialism: Egypt’s 20th Annual Youth Salon,” e-flux Journal, 7 (June-August 2009). Christan Jambet, The Act of Being: The Philosophy of Revelation in Mullâ Sadrâ (New York: Zone, 2006).