“I remember people screaming and banging on the doors, these maddening screams,” recalls former prisoner Gerrah Selby of his return to Holloway Prison.

“I couldn’t sleep for a long time because I was too scared of the noise and to fall asleep, but I wanted to sleep so badly throughout my sentence.”

Gemma, who was sentenced to four years in prison for offenses related to her animal rights activism, is one of six former inmates returned to Europe’s largest women’s prison with the makers of a new documentary. Holloway, The film premiered at the London Film Festival recently.

Back in North London’s dilapidated prison – destroyed by bulldozers since their visit. – With the help of a trauma therapist, they reflected on their time there and the events that led to their arrest.

Memories came flooding back as the women sat in chairs covered in dust with crumbling walls in the background.

Tamar Mujanay, who was first arrested after getting into a fight at the age of 11, was imprisoned for gang-related crimes when she was 18.

“I had always heard of Holloway’s name and history in the media. But once I entered that space, I didn’t know what to expect,” he told BBC London.

“I felt so small, like another dimension. It’s just rules, rules, rules; you feel powerless.”

“There’s no sense of decency. It’s like ‘you committed a crime, you’re here to serve your time.'”

One of the most worrying things for Tamar was the number of women who kept returning.

“The number of returnees was truly ridiculous. There were drug addicts, people suffering from domestic or sexual abuse, all of whom couldn’t get help.

“When I talked to them there was an emotional disconnect and they were happy to be inside.

“That made me ask the question: ‘What support are they not getting, which means they’re happiest when they come back here?'”

Daisy-May Hudson, one of the documentary’s co-directors, explained that they hope the film will show people some compassion for the women incarcerated at Holloway.

“This was to give context to their stories; prison is perceived as the place we send people to, but we don’t know anything about the lives of the people there.”

The filmmakers and former inmates wanted to address why the women came to Holloway and how justice could be achieved in the future.

Co-director Sophie Compton told BBC London: “Everyone thought Holloway would be there forever. This really shows that systems that we thought would be there forever can collapse.”

“We walked past the building a lot and started talking to women who had been in prison and realized how important this place was to British women’s history and felt it should be marked and honoured.

“When a massive prison is bulldozed, it raises a lot of questions about what to build in its place.

“Where are the women in prison when Holloway was bulldozed? Where did they go?”

Tamar said returning to Holloway was “very personal.”

“After my release, I realized there was no place or space where I could take back and heal the power that had been taken from me.

“I was so caught up in practical things like giving back to society that I didn’t have time to reinvent myself.

“The (therapist) session really helped me a lot, I shared with other women. I felt it helped me regain my strength of character.

“It was liberating for me to go back of my own free will, compared to all the rules I had to live by the last time I was there.”

“The system has a term for moving prisoners called ‘unloading’,” says Sophie Compton. “So women have been evacuated, and I think that’s very lacking in terms of humanity, agency and empathy.

“We always wanted this movie to act like, ‘I had an invitation to rethink,’ and an invitation to reimagine some of these systems.”

“Now it is finally coming out that there is a huge public debate around the women’s justice system.

“Finally more people in power are saying the same things we have been saying for a long time, which is that our society is addicted to punishment and that punishment is the only way the system interacts with people who have done something wrong.

“That fails to set the context and therefore doesn’t create the possibility for things to change, and that’s why we felt it was really important for us to deal with Holloway’s closure.”

Holloway premiered at the London Film Festival and will be in cinemas in spring 2025