While much thought has been given to the tropism of the border as a 'spectacle' (De Genova, 2002; 2013), i.e. to highlighting the illegality and deportability of exiled people, and to the 'Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes' (Boletsi, Houwen, Minnaard, 2020), it seems crucial to reflect on the blind spots in the representation of transnational movements and the careers and lived experiences of exiles. We hypothesize that « the border at the counter » (Infantino, 2020), and more broadly bureaucratic border policies, constitute in some way the archetype of these repertoires of missing images. Through the critical analysis of a corpus of European documentary films made since the so-called 'refugee crisis' of 2015, we propose to reflect on the ways and audiovisual terms in which the border and possible militancy are staged « at the counter » (Avanza, Miaz, Péchu, Voutat, 2023). Drawing on the theories of Street-Level Bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980), the aim is to take on board Alexis Spire's perspective on asylum at the counter, or 'counter politics', conceived as the sociology of administrative acts taken at the level of interaction between civil servants 'on the ground' and the target public. We also need to think about the positionality of film-makers, both from a decolonial point of view (Larcher, 2023), and from the point of view of the interrelationships between audio-visual staging and filming.