About the Film
Not Ours To Carry is a 38-minute documentary set in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, in the aftermath of one of the most under-reported conflicts of the 21st century.
Between 2020 and 2022, sexual violence was deployed systematically as a weapon of war. Thousands of women were assaulted. Most have never been heard.
This film follows three women, not survivors, but the ones who refused to let survivors disappear. Advocates, witnesses, carriers of other people's pain. Through their journeys, Not Ours To Carry moves between the present, intimate, unguarded, shot with deep trust, and the past, rendered through original animation created by a Tigrayan artist. Hand-drawn and rooted in the visual culture of the region, the animation holds what testimony alone cannot: the texture of life before the war, and the precise moment it shattered.
The result is a film that refuses both spectacle and silence. It asks not just what happened to these women, but what it means to bear witness, and what it costs to keep bearing it.
The Tigray conflict lasted two years and killed hundreds of thousands of people. For 17 months, a communications blackout, the longest in modern history, cut the region off from the world. What was happening inside that silence, including the systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war against an estimated 350,000 women and girls, was happening in darkness.
Female suffering was not a consequence of this war. It was a strategy.
I made this film because darkness is a choice, and I didn't want to be part of it.
Not Ours To Carry follows three women: a former soldier, a researcher, and a UK citizen, each carrying the weight of other people's survival. They are not the survivors themselves. They are the ones who refused to let survivors be forgotten, who took what they knew and carried it forward, into their communities and onto the world stage. Their courage is the spine of this film.
The past moves through the film as animation, created by a Tigrayan artist. It was the only honest way to hold what cannot be photographed, memory, the moment before everything changed. Set against the raw intimacy of the present, it became something I didn't expect: a visual language for grief that still insists on beauty.
I am a filmmaker committed to women's rights and human dignity. But more than that, I am someone who sat with these women and listened. This film is my attempt to make their voices matter.
Veronica Blecker is a London-based documentary filmmaker. She began her career making films for NGOs, telling stories at the intersection of human rights and community. She went on to work on ABBA Voyage as a documentary filmmaker before joining Pophouse Entertainment. Not Ours To Carry marks her return to the human rights stories that first drew her to filmmaking.