Deadline has teamed up with The Brit List to profile some of the emerging writers who have featured in this year’s rankings of the best unproduced British film and TV projects. Launched in 2007, The Brit List has previously featured projects such as The king’s speech And Paddington. In this article we talk to Bethan Moore about her storyline for the Brit List 2025 The widows’ union.
While British writer Bethan Moore spent much of her childhood abroad, including in Uganda and Brunei, it was the six years she spent growing up in Hungary that inspired her second feature film script. The widows’ union.
Brit List’s screenplay, which straddles the line between dark comedy and drama, is set in early 20th century Hungary, where a village knitting club takes it upon itself to poison its abusive husbands with arsenic. More than 130 men are murdered and the club’s leader, the young, handsome and crazy Zsofi Kovacs, is put on trial and faces the death penalty. But did she really do something wrong?
“It was a story that I had always heard growing up, and which I initially thought was a rumor, that this whole village of women in the 1920s had just poisoned all their husbands,” Moore tells Deadline. “And this is the second or third time this has happened in Hungarian history. There have been a lot of mass poisonings of women killing men in their lifetime and that just fascinated me.”
The widows’ unionwhich is still looking for producers, was Moore’s final year project at the UK’s prestigious National Film and Television School and her writing, she says, “really connected me to this Hungarian feminine spirit that I always loved”.
She adds: “I lived most of my childhood abroad and then returned to the UK in my early twenties, so a lot of my writing is inspired by the different places I’ve lived. »
At the time of writing, Moore admits she was “pretty angry” about a lot of the things she was seeing about women in the news, admitting she started the script after seeing the high-profile British story of Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old woman who was kidnapped and murdered by an off-duty police officer as she walked home one evening in 2021. “I wanted to write about and respond to these women who are facing this violence in a way that is becoming more and more uncontrollable.
Moore says the film is in the same vein as Yorgos Lanthimos’. The favoritestating that it is a parody of the era but based on a true historical incident. “It plays pretty fast and loose with the precision of it all. »
For her research, Moore relied heavily on the books of Hungarian academics and was able to access the original transcripts of the murders at the time. Her main character, she says, is an amalgam of the women present in these transcriptions and the script even contains a few lines that were taken verbatim from them.
“The courts were making ridiculous smears about these women,” Moore says. “There was a point where they brought in a sexologist who said they were all suffering from sexual hysteria because the men had been at war and that was used as evidence in this case.”
Moore was also drawn to the fact that these crimes were not finally discovered until a local census was taken and it became clear that these men were dying. “They weren’t even investigating these crimes because it was a completely isolated village,” she said.
“There was no police presence or anywhere for these women to go for help. So when you’re completely on your own and you’re completely hopeless, what are you driven towards? Can you kill with good intentions? The main character has a real savior complex, and she really believes in what she’s doing until it gets completely out of control and everyone starts dying. It’s definitely not a condoning-killing scenario – it’s more of a scenario who wonders where this violence comes from and what people are pushed towards.
