Genre
Synopsis
WHAT SHE LEFT IN ME is an intimate documentary by filmmaker Sivan Levy Zakin that unfolds during the final months of her first pregnancy. As she prepares to give birth, she begins searching for traces of her grandmother, a midwife, a Yugoslavian partisan, and a woman shaped by war, who built a life through love, family, and the things she couldn’t say.
With only old footage, scattered documents, and questions no one ever answered, she returns to the spaces her grandmother once occupied — quiet rooms, winter streets in Serbia — and turns to an AI tool not to revive the past, but to reach toward a voice that was never allowed to speak.
The film asks: What do we carry into motherhood when the stories we come from were never told? What memories live in the body? What does absence leave behind?
WHAT SHE LEFT IN ME is a quiet, intimate portrait of matrilineal memory, where voice, image, and technology come together to reach for what history tried to bury, and what the next generation refuses to forget.
Bio
Sivan Levy Zakin is a filmmaker, composer, and actress. Her shorts Cherchez la Femme and Dina & Noel premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. Her recent short, LOSS, follows a girl navigating grief and gendered violence in a militarized landscape. Sivan scores her work with voice, piano and modular synths. She is currently developing her first narrative feature about how closeness becomes its own form of resistance, and a hybrid documentary exploring memory, absence, and matrilineal legacy.
