She held everyone else’s story. Then she told her own.
For almost two decades Maleena produced and directed other people’s stories, in edit suites, boardrooms and communities of every kind. Somewhere along the way she had stopped being a person with a story of her own.
When she turned the camera on herself, on her mother and on the silences they had kept for decades, she learned things about emotional readiness, narrative architecture and holding a story safely that no broadcast credit could have taught her.
The film previewed at BAFTA, aired on Channel 4 in December 2025, and won the RTS Southern Award for Best Single Documentary. It opened a dialogue where there had previously been silence, on screens and in living rooms that rarely get to see themselves.
“A distinctive voice in documentary — tender, raw, and unafraid in bringing vulnerable stories to screen.”
Photograph: Mikael Buck · People Like Us x Penguin. Maleena has spoken about the film and its impact from BAFTA to Penguin HQ to the House of Commons.
