This paper will address the aesthetics of dispossession and space in contemporary Maghribi documentaries. While paying particular attention to two recent films, Un rond point dans ma tête (Hassan Ferhani, 2015) and Samir dans la poussière (Mohamed Ouzine, 2015), my paper situates them in relation to other destabilizing representations of reality, such as Tariq Teguia's La clôture (Haçla) (2004), Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche's Bled number one (2006) and several new films from Tunisia. These filmmakers experiment with interview, performance, direct address, and a formal preoccupation with the border between fiction and the real, all of which function to further localize the sense of despair articulated by their male characters. Such an experimentation centers on the creation of an imaginary from the interaction of documentary subjects and the filmmaker in a way that recalls Jean Rouch’s experiments with “cine-ethnography.” Like Rouch, these filmmakers are interested in the ways that performance might allow for a different kind of imaginary to be constructed, one that would allow for new relations between places and people. Their attempts to “improvise” cinema (Mouëllic) owe a great deal to this approach, but they also draw on legacies of Arab cinema from the postcolonial period. Consequently, this paper addresses the films that historical context, too, considering them in the light of earlier cinematic articulations of social reality such as those of the “defeat-conscious cinema” identified by Nouri Bouzid. Bouzid traced changing representations of the male hero in the aftermath of 1967, which produced, he argued, a new realist cinema for a new imaginary, one dominated by the traumas of that year--the loss of Palestine and the resignation of Jamal Abd al-Nasser. The contemporary Maghribi documentaries analyzed here produce a different sense of defeat, one borne out of the failed promises of the so-called Arab Spring and a consciousness of the perils and impossibilities of Mediterranean migration. In so doing, they offer a new postulation of gendered Maghribi imaginaries within a global Middle East. Bouzid, Nouri. “New Realism in Arab Cinema: the Defeat-Conscious Cinema.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 15 (1995): 242-50. Mouëllic, Gilles. Improviser le cinéma. Crisnée, Belgium: Yellow Now, 2011. Rouch, Jean. Ciné-Ethnography. Edited and translated by Steven Feld. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.