The Song We Carry, directed by Emmy-winning filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer Tamana Ayazi, was filmed in Manchester between early 2025 and early 2026. It documents the experiences of the Without Borders Youth Band, a group of young musicians from across the world who now call the city home. 

Through rehearsals, interviews and everyday moments, the film introduces Nour, a 19-year old Syrian Iranian singer, alongside her brother Sina, as well as Callie, Nazar and Pat. Each brought their own musical traditions, histories and experiences of migration into a shared creative space. 

The film documents the creation of original music, woven from these individual stories into a collective expression of identity. In this process, heritage is both remembered and remade, carried across borders and reshaped through collaboration. 

Reflecting on the project, Tamana Ayazi describes how ‘each of them carries a unique story, but through collaboration they created something collective and deeply moving…a universal language of music that connects us all.’ 

At a time when migration is often framed through distance and division, The Song We Carry offers something different: an invitation to listen. Through voices, faces and music, it asks audiences to encounter lived experience directly, and reveals heritage not as something abstract, but human, personal and shared. In doing so, the film becomes a record of this moment in time and a testament to the enduring role of music in shaping identity, preserving memory and building new forms of belonging.