One of the most impressive aspects of Qatar’s new national museum, which opened in April 2019, are the floor-to-ceiling films that were specially commissioned to fill the curved walls of various galleries and to complement the artifacts displayed within. One of these films, a 9-minute piece found in the “Life in Al Barr (Desert)” gallery, depicts a day in the life of a family in the northern desert of Qatar. Part of the “People of Qatar” narrative, this gallery focuses on the desert’s “distinctive way of life” from the 1950s (wall inscription, authors’ visit, May 2, 2019). Yet nowhere in this gallery—or elsewhere in the museum—is the word “Bedouin” used, nor is there any indication that the new film is based on a 16-minute film created by a 1959 Danish anthropological expedition (Bang 1962; Ferdinand 1993; Nielsen 2009). We argue in this paper that these omissions are deliberate and a part of a specific nation-building narrative: a unified message of national identity and heritage in which all Qataris traversed between the desert and the sea on a seasonal basis (Al-Hammadi 2018; Mitchell and Curtis 2018). For a country that does not have a large number of tangible historical artifacts (Commins 2012), the hundreds of photographs and film from the 1959 Danish expedition are crucial pieces of evidence of Qatar’s desert-dwelling past. These pieces of evidence, however, stand in sharp contrast to the top-down narrative of a unified national heritage. In this research, we explore how the new national museum displays and represents these old media objects in ways that support its heritage narrative. We have two major findings. First, we explain how many of the extant photographs and clips of the original film footage can be found on the walls and in the digital interactives of the gallery, structured as modules that focus on a particular ritual, skill, or tool. This strategy highlights preferred evidence and removes problematic scenes that contradict a sense of unity. Second, we demonstrate how the original 1962 film has been reimagined by a new director and curatorial team: the new film retains elements of the original but uses new visuals to promote the unity narrative that combines desert and sea lifestyles. Together, our findings contribute to the ongoing conversation about the relationship between new narratives, old media, museums, and nation-building in the Gulf (Erskine-Loftus, Hightower, and Al-Mulla 2016; Exell and Wakefield 2016).