Experiencing Interruptions?

What We Carried

Filmed entirely with a mobile phone in displacement, What We Carried explores memory, loss, and resilience through the voices of those who stayed - three generations of Palestinian women — a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter — recount what remains after a lifetime of forced displacement. From the Nakba of 1948 to the ongoing military occupation and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

  • Carolina Pereira
    Director
  • Carolina Pereira
    Writer
  • Carolina Pereira
    Producer
  • Dima Akram
    Producer
  • Abdul Rahman
    Producer
  • Maysar Wadi
    Key Cast
    "Maysar Wadi - Grandmother"
  • Ibtisam Wadi
    Key Cast
    "Ibtisam Wadi - Mother"
  • Samoud Wadi
    Key Cast
    "Samoud – Granddaughter"
  • Abdul Rahman
    Cinematographer & Principal Camera Operator
  • Omar Al-Aklouk
    Local Production Assistant & Additional Camera Operator
  • Ibrahim Al-Shurayhi
    Local Production Assistant & Additional Camera Operator
  • João Monge
    Editor
  • Dima Akram
    Translation & Subtitling
  • Luis Salgueiro
    Translation & Subtitling
  • Serene Issa
    Colouring
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Short
  • Genres:
    Documentary, Real Story, Political, Feminism
  • Runtime:
    17 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    August 20, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    50,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Palestine, State of, Portugal
  • Country of Filming:
    Palestine, State of
  • Language:
    Arabic
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Carolina Pereira

Carolina Pereira is a filmmaker, writer, and founder of Don’t Skip Humanity, an independent production company working at the intersection of cinema, journalism, and activism. She co-directed two documentaries shot entirely in Gaza — Free Fish and What We Carried — focusing on intimate stories of resistance and forced displacement. Her work engages young creators in conflict zones and explores storytelling as a form of collective memory and political mobilization.

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Director Statement

What We Carried is a film of listening, presence, and refusal.
It listens to three Palestinian women - grandmother, mother, and daughter - forced to move again and again within their own land. It stays with them, without imposing pace, structure, or external voice. It refuses the erasure of their history, their bodies, and their existence.

This documentary was born from a clear political choice: to stand with those who have been silenced.
In a world saturated with decontextualized images of Palestine, this film chooses radical intimacy. Shot entirely on a mobile phone inside a displacement tent in Gaza, it breaks away from voyeurism and distance. The camera is no longer a tool of extraction - it becomes invisible, breathable. Presence becomes relation.

The decision to film with a phone was not a constraint — it was an aesthetic and political choice. The device allowed the women to speak freely, without a script, without filters. It allowed them to forget they were being filmed - and reminded the viewer, in every frame, that these lives are real.

The result is a rare kind of intimacy. A closeness that invites listening - not explanation.

The three protagonists belong to the same family, yet experience different - and deeply interconnected - consequences of the creation of the State of Israel and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

Maysar, the grandmother, was expelled from Beersheba during the Nakba in 1948.
Ibtisam, the mother, was born in exile and carries the weight of survival under permanent siege.
Samoud, the daughter, grows up among rubble and absence - but still believes she might one day tell stories. Because storytelling is resistance.

What We Carried rejects the language of “neutrality”, “tragedy” or “conflict”. There is no external framing - only what is lived. What is carried - and what has been taken.

This is also a film about care as a political language. About the feminine gesture as archive.
In a landscape where only approximately 33% of Middle Eastern documentaries with international visibility have women protagonists, What We Carried asserts a deliberate presence: all protagonists are women. They are the ones who cook, protect, remember, write, and refuse to disappear.
They are the ones who carry.

This is not a film about Palestine - it is a film from Palestine.
A gesture of counter-narrative in the face of an ongoing genocide. An archive of emotional and political resistance.

What they carry - in their bodies, in their hands, in their words — cannot be contained in a war report.
But it holds the weight of history.
And the right to life.

Carolina Pereira
Director, What We Carried