After Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the most significant Palestinian film archive—containing dozens of documentaries made under the aegis of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)—was lost, either to bombing or seizure by Israeli forces. While some of these films have since been found in Israeli archives (Sela 2017), reconstructed from copies (by Kamran Rastegar, Emily Jacir, Annemarie Jacir and others), and written about by scholars and filmmakers (Denes 2014, Gertz and Khleifi 2008, Jacir 2007, Yaqub 2018), most remain inaccessible. The significance of this archival absence resides both in the loss of a critical visual history, as these were among the first Palestinian self-representations in film, and in constituting yet another material limit to constructing a Palestinian narrative rooted in sources considered to be documentary evidence (as opposed to e.g. oral testimonies, often disparaged). In his essay “Permission to Narrate,” Edward Said argues that factual reports of Israel’s war crimes in 1982 did not ultimately determine attitudes toward Israeli conduct as much as the interpretive frameworks adhering to Palestinians and to Israel. I extend Said’s argument by surveying Palestinian cinematic history, in which the genre of documentary predominates (especially prior to the emergence of auteurs like Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman), and by highlighting recent Palestinian documentaries that redress archival loss not by finding traces of factual evidence but by narrating and imagining from their absence. I focus on Azza El-Hassan’s 2004 documentary Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image, which follows the filmmaker through Amman, Beirut, Damascus, and Ramallah as she speaks with people connected to the PLO film archive. More than a search for the archive, El-Hassan’s film becomes a quest for images and stories that will reanimate Palestinian freedom dreams, across the borders and less visible chasms that keep Palestinians fragmented. She infuses her journey with folkloric and fabulous qualities, so that the aim of retrieving what has been lost is overtaken by the reconstruction of “potential histories” (Azoulay 2019), political possibilities that were suppressed before they could be realized, but which endure in social practices and in the imagination. I propose “reparative fabulation” as a mode of narration attuned to potentialities, and not only facts, as I engage with Said’s above essay, and decolonial feminist critiques of historiography that include Saidiya Hartman’s model of “critical fabulation,” Rosemary Sayigh’s ethnographies of Palestinian refugee women storytellers, and Omnia el-Shakry’s notion of “history without documents.”