Breaking the silence in the South Asian community: Q&A with 'Saving Mum' filmmaker Maleena Pone

Here, we find out more about Maleena, her mum Jas and the personal documentary about their experiences of alcohol harm, airing this week on Channel 4.

I’m a filmmaker, born and raised in Southampton, though I’ve lived most of my adult life in London where I built my career. I recently moved back home, which has brought me closer to my mum, Jas, and my younger sister Laila in a way I hadn’t expected.

My relationship with my mum has always held a great deal of love, but like many families, especially when alcohol harm is present, it’s also carried layers of silence, misunderstandings, and years of coping the best way we knew how. She is warm, intuitive and deeply emotional, and for a long time I didn’t understand why life felt so heavy for her. Now, in our healing, I see how much she was carrying without the tools or language to express it.

The film follows me and my mum as we try to confront the grief, trauma and patterns that shaped our lives, and the impact my mum’s long-term struggle with alcohol had on all of us. It’s an intimate, honest look at our relationship as we try to find a way back to each other while also acknowledging the truth of what we've lived through. It’s emotional, sometimes messy, often tender but at its heart, it’s a story about love and the courage it takes to rebuild trust.

I think I’ve always navigated life through the lens of compassion and storytelling. Observing, documenting and trying to understand people has often felt easier than actually living through some of the really difficult things happening around me.

There was a part of me that needed to understand our experience on a deeper level. I had spent so long searching for meaning; why things felt so unfair, why the grief in our home felt endless, why loving someone with addiction felt like a cycle I couldn’t break no matter how hard I tried. Making the film became a way to reframe the story I was carrying. I needed to metabolise what had happened, to alchemise the pain into something that didn’t drown me.

It also softened my grip on wanting my mum to change before she was ready. And creatively, witnessing other people making profound personal transformations made me want to honour that spirit of possibility. If our story could help even one person feel less alone, then it was worth telling.

I hope they feel seen. I hope they feel less ashamed. And I hope they realise that what happens inside our homes is not a personal failing - it’s a human story, and one many families quietly live through.

For South Asian daughters and mothers in particular, I hope this film gives language to the things we’ve never been taught to name. Healing is possible. Repair is possible. Even if it’s imperfect, even if it’s slow, even when the past feels too heavy.

It does. My mum’s drinking didn’t look like the stereotypes we see. It showed up as overwhelm, sadness, and emotional collapse. And because South Asian women are expected to be endlessly strong and endlessly giving, she didn’t feel she had permission to say she was struggling.

There is so much fear of judgement in our community. Fear of losing respect, fear of being misunderstood, fear of being blamed. That fear kept my mum silent. It kept me silent too. And that silence is exactly what I hope this film helps to break.

I want culturally sensitive support for South Asian women - services that understand the nuances of family, honour, gendered expectations and the secrecy that often surrounds alcohol harm in our communities.

I also want people to know that healing does not only look like one thing. There are alternative and culturally grounded ways to understand ourselves that can lead to profound breakthroughs. When we understand the root of our pain, we can understand our behaviours with much more tenderness.

And above all, I hope the film reminds people that love is still possible in the midst of hardship. So much of this story is held together by love - even when we didn’t have the words for it. If viewers can feel even a fraction of that, then we’ve done what we came to do.

Saving Mum airs on Channel 4 on 10 December at 11.10pm, and will be available to stream afterwards on Channel 4’s 4OD platform.