For the past ten years, I've been working on a television series called GREENHAVEN.

it all began when I was sixteen years old, sat in my Film Studies class three months before my mother died.

As my teacher drifted on about his life story, one scene flashed into my imagination: a boy running down the stairs of an inner-city tower block, documents in hand, pursued by a mysterious man in black.

Although I have had many ideas before then - and even now -, at that moment, I knew this was something different - that this (whatever this was) was going to be something special.

My mother, Yasmin, was a community worker, a friend, and one of my earliest teachers. Diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease when I was ten, she would spend the next six years, in and out of wards at Southampton General Hospital - which would become our second home.

After a lengthy battle, she eventually passed away on December 20th, 2016, five days before Christmas, in the one place she wanted to get away from.

Now, I don’t mention this arbitrarily. I am a firm believer that trials and suffering, however difficult they are, serve as the catalyst for great change.

I have seen it time and time again, not just in my own life, but with people I have spoken to - and the hundreds of students I have been honoured to teach.

My mother’s death was a real turning point in my life. Whilst many would have gone off the rails, and pursued a life of drugs and crime, I picked up a pen and started writing on a secondhand iMac gifted to me by the Young Carers group I belonged to. Eventually, that one scene I had months prior, would become GREENHAVEN:

“A young black medical student, with an ailing mother, stumbles upon grave secrets at the prestigious hospital his ailing mother resides at, soon attracting the attention of powerful global forces, and a Machiavellian man in black, hellbent on retrieving the damning evidence, and silencing him before the truth reaches the outside world.”

After months of writing and late-nights plotting out the show, the first rejection letter from the BBC arrived just weeks after my eighteenth birthday.

“DEAR KAMAL, EVEN THOUGH WE FOUND YOUR IDEA INTERESTING… IT WAS VERY EXPOSITIONAL AND WORDY IN PLACES.”

Even though I knew I was onto something, I was also acutely conscious that this wasn’t going to happen overnight. If I wanted to write and shepherd a television series, I would have to build up my skillset.

And so, what followed was the long apprenticeship — university, then libraries and coffee shops, then back to university for a degree in English Literature, then production work for ITV and National Geographic, then a one-way flight to teach drama in China - all with the conviction that I would do whatever it takes to bring this series into fruition. Every year, across countries and classrooms, Greenhaven stayed with me - deepenign into something beautiful.

And now, almost ten years on, and now with the support of Carin Van Den Bosch, we are now pitching to leading US networks - including NETFLIX, HBO, and APPLE TV, to ensure that GREENHAVEN, a series that to this day, is like no other, is brought to the right home - and, hopefully, resonate with a global audience.

See you on the other side.