Some people baked bread in 2020. Five of us started a studio. Gunung Cherita was born in the throes of a pandemic, with one question at its heart: what does it mean to be Malaysian, and how can this country be a home for everyone? Our pitch deck put it plainly. “Millennials are not only hungry for change, we are starved for it.”
The work was about making hard things human. Think tanks, NGOs, government agencies and corporations all hold knowledge that matters, often buried in numbers. We called our answer the Socratic method of storytelling: ask the right questions, find the right sources, then make something people can recognise themselves in. We made content and publications, gave messaging advice, and ran courses in storytelling, design, podcasting and PR.
Then we made the leap into film production, a bigger jump than it looks. For what came of it all, watch Maryam Pagi ke Malam and catch GenMeme, the lockdown series whose spirit grew into the studio.