This essay explores the role of media production within a framework of urban citizenship. Urban citizenship is defined in terms of strategies rather than location: not as a "bundle of rights, but as a struggle for expanding the public sphere." The possibilities of using media narratives and images to negotiate a place in the city are explored through a set of short films produced by participants in community arts projects in Sydney. I trace how media forms are a key to attending to the "unreal" materialities and temporalities of everyday dimensions of citizenship within states of exclusion.