Syndicate

Deadline has partnered with The Brit List to profile some of the emerging writers who have made this year’s ranking of the best unproduced UK film and TV projects. Launched in 2007, The Brit List has previously featured projects including The King’s Speech and Paddington. In this piece, we talk to Bethan Moore about her Brit List 2025 script The Widow Making Syndicate.

While British writer Bethan Moore spent much of her childhood abroad in places such as Uganda and Brunei, it’s the six years she spent growing up in Hungary that inspired her second feature script The Widow Making Syndicate. 

The Brit List script, which treads the line between black comedy and drama, is set in the early 20th Century Hungary where a village knitting club takes it upon themselves to poison their abusive husbands with arsenic. More than 130 men are murdered and the club’s ringleader, the young, beautiful and crazy Zsofi Kovacs is put on trial, facing the death penalty. But has she actually done anything wrong? 

“It was a story that I had always heard growing up, which I initially thought was a rumor, where this entire village of women in the 1920s just poisoned all of their husbands,” Moore tells Deadline. “And this is the second or third time that it actually happened in Hungarian history. There’s been quite a lot of mass poisonings of women killing men in their lives and it just fascinated me.”

The Widow Making Syndicate, which is still looking for producers, was Moore’s graduation project at the UK’s prestigious National Film and Television School and writing it, she says, “really connected me to this Hungarian female spirit that I’ve always loved.”  

She adds: “I lived most of my childhood abroad and then came back to the UK in my early twenties, so a lot of my writing draws on the different places I’ve lived. “

At the time of writing, Moore admits she was “quite angry” about a lot of things she was seeing about women in the news, admitting she started the script after seeing the high-profile UK 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 these women who are facing this violence and respond to it in a way which gets increasingly out of hand.” 

Moore says the film is in a similar vein to Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, stating that it’s a parody of the time but based on a true, historical incident. “It plays pretty fast and loose with the accuracy of it all.” 

For her research, Moore leaned heavily into books from Hungarian academics and was able to access original court transcripts of the murders at the time. Her main character, she says, is an amalgamation of the women in these transcripts and the script even features a few lines that were taken verbatim from them. 

“The courts were making these ridiculous aspersions about these women,” Moore says. “There was one point where they brought in a sexologist who said that 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 only ultimately discovered at the time when a local census was conducted and it became apparent that these men were dying. “They weren’t even investigating them as crimes, because it was a completely isolated village,” she says.

“There was no police presence or anywhere these women could go for help. So, when you’re left completely to your own devices, and you’re completely desperate, what are you driven to? Can you murder with good intentions? The main character has a real saviour complex, and she really believes in what she is doing until it gets completely out of hand and everyone starts dying. It’s definitely not a script that condones murder – it’s more of a script that questions where this violence comes from and what people are driven to.”