In the final months of pregnancy, two women confront irreversible choices that will reshape their lives and the families around them. CARRYING observes the fragile space where love, loss, and uncertainty meet, asking what it truly takes to raise a child - and who is asked to carry that weight.
CARRYING is an intimate verité documentary that follows two women during the final months of pregnancy as each considers one of the most profound decisions a person can face - whether to raise her child or entrust them to another family through adoption. The film bears witness to the emotional weight of choice when no path forward is without sacrifice.
Rachael is recently divorced and working hard to keep her family afloat. She is considering adoption as a means of survival, but an adoptee herself, she fears that placing her daughter for adoption could pass on the same sense of abandonment she has carried since childhood. But if she keeps her baby, will the rest of her family suffer as a result? As Rachael weighs the decision before her, she begins to question the story she has long told herself about her own beginnings.
Within a month of graduating high school, nineteen-year-old Nikole loses her father to cancer and discovers she is pregnant. As she prepares for motherhood while grieving the loss of a parent, she struggles to determine whether she is ready to become one herself.
The film builds toward each woman's labor, delivery, and the critical forty-eight hours that follow, when each must make a final and irreversible decision.
In the aftermath, Nikole begins rebuilding her life while carrying a new kind of grief, and Rachael embarks on a search for her birth mother, discovering a deeper understanding of the choices, and the people, that shaped her own life.
Observed with quiet proximity, CARRYING explores the families we inherit and create, and the profound responsibility of carrying another person through love, uncertainty, and loss. The film invites audiences to sit with moral and emotional complexity rather than resolution, asking universal questions about agency, belonging, and what we owe one another.
Din is an award-winning filmmaker based in Birmingham, AL and was recently selected by the Producers Guild of America to be one of this year’s PGA Create Fellows. Her first documentary, REFUGE, was Executive Produced by Katie Couric and has won both the Audience Award and Jury Award for Best Documentary at multiple film festivals. REFUGE was included in USA Today’s List of Movies to Watch in 2023 and is now available on all digital platforms and all Delta flights worldwide. The film is distributed by Shout! Studios. She is currently in post-production on CARRYING, which follows several pregnant women who are considering adoption. Each will ultimately decide whether to raise their children or place them into the arms of another family. Prior to filmmaking, Din worked as an architectural designer for over a decade. She has a Masters in Architecture with High Distinction from the University of Michigan and a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Virginia. Din serves on the board of SUBJECT MATTER, which provides funds to documentary films highlighting urgent social issues and to nonprofits tackling the featured topics.
PGA Create Fellowship 2023
Director & Producer - Din Blankenship
Producer - Elizabeth Lodge Stepp
Editor - Leigh Johnson
Executive Producer - Frank Marshall & the Kennedy/Marshall Company
Executive Producer - Brenda Robinson
