A quick scan across the recent books written on Arab cinema reveals the primacy of auteur studies in the field, attesting to the persistent relevance of the cinematic in the age of the posts, despite some claims that cinema lies in the dustbins of history. Indeed, all the available electronic media forms of this new age, the age of the archive, actually affirm the social significance of cinema, at the very least in enabling greater opportunities for the works of Arab auteurs to be known, read about, in some cases watched, and researched in the English and European languages (mainly French and German). My talk will focus on two understudied and deceased auteurs, the Lebanese Randa Chahal Sabbagh and the Syrian Omar Amirallay, both of whom died as exiles in France. I argue that they can each be considered respectively as leading voices of antagonistic discourse in two under-mined areas of Arab auteur research: Arab women filmmakers and Arab documentary film. From Our Heedless Wars to The Kite, Sabbagh was a maker of both fiction and non-fiction films during the 1980s and 1990s, each of which reflected on the intrusion of violent geo-national politics and sectarianism in Lebanese society. From Everyday Life in a Syrian Village to Flood in Baath Country Amirallay used the cinematic language of verite as testimony, portrait and statement countering official narratives of the Syrian state apparatus. My talk will examine their contributions and legacies to these respective areas - Arab women filmmakers and Arab documentary film – areas that are now burgeoning with filmmakers due to the availability afforded by digital technologies and the distribution capabilities of the internet. Armes, Roy. New Voices in Arab Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015 Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary. New York: Routledge, 2006 Durovicova, Natasa & Newman, Kathleen, ed. World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2010 Marks, Laura. Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image. Camebridge: MIT Press, 2015 Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rastegar, Kamran. Surviving Images: Cinema, War and Cultural Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015