Selective mutism traps children who can speak fluently at home into silence everywhere else, and this Channel 4 film from 2006 follows a handful of them trying to break out of it. The camera sits in classrooms and living rooms watching kids who freeze the moment a teacher or stranger expects them to talk, then relax back into ordinary chatter once the pressure lifts. Parents and therapists describe years of misread signals, teachers who assumed defiance or low intelligence rather than a diagnosable anxiety disorder, and the slow, deliberate work of speech therapy aimed at building confidence one word at a time. The film stays close to a small number of families rather than surveying the condition broadly, so the isolation and the small breakthroughs both land as specific, not statistical. There is no single explanation offered for why these children go quiet, only the daily reality of a house where a child talks freely and a school where the same child says nothing at all.