The Brit List Unveils 2024 Lineup

The Brit List, which showcases outstanding writing talent from the U.K. that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, has unveiled its 16th list, which features 13 scripts by 15 writers.

The list was compiled from recommendations by British production companies, talent agencies, sales companies, financiers, distributors and broadcasters. A minimum of ten recommendations was needed for inclusion.

The Rubber Faced Men by Faebian Averies made the list with 28 recommendations. The crime script, with NBCUniversal attached as producer, takes place in West Wales in 1983 and sees one man and his teenage stepson go about taking down an international drug smuggling ring after uncovering a secret bunker on the beach.

Chika by Jenny Takahashi Stark, with Fable Pictures as producer, received 24 recommendations. The coming-of-age comedy drama is about a working-class Oxbridge student who deals drugs to fund her dad’s desperately needed heart surgery.

Christina Sweeney-Baird’s Conflicts amassed 22 recommendations to land on The Brit List. With Euston Films attached as producer, the crime drama centers on a criminal barrister who is assigned to the defense team of the man she thinks killed her sister 12 years prior.

With 21 recommendations, Behave Yourselves by Richard Tahmasebi and Christopher Vernon landed on the 2024 list. In the comedy, Craig is desperate to impress Dallas, his charismatic work-dad at a Brooklyn-based digital marketing company. The lengths he is willing to go to are tested when their company ski trip to a run-down New England resort goes off the rails after a member of the IT department dies in mysterious circumstances. Big Talk is attached as a producer.

Catch A Butcher by Cassiah Joski-Jethi, Night Movers by Jakob Lancaster and Counting Cards with My Father by Lydia Rui Huang each procured 12 recommendations.

Catch A Butcher, with Tedium Entertainment as producer, is a psychological horror set in 19th-century India, where a naive English nurse arrives at an isolated maternity hospital on a quest to continue her father’s legacy of “caring for” the mixed-race babies born from British soldiers and Indian women. The nurse soon discovers a sinister force lurking inside not just the hospital but also herself.

Night Movers, available for producers, is a darkly comic crime thriller that centers on two siblings who run an undercover “night movers” business. It draws influences from shows such as Guilt and Bad Sisters, as well as from film noirs like Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity.

Counting Cards with My Father, meanwhile, sees troubled teen Lisa seek out their estranged poker-playing father after being sick of bouncing around from home to home. After hunting him down at the casino, Lisa manages to convince him to become a team for the upcoming tournament. Arenamedia is attached as a producer.

With 11 recommendations each, Heart of the Earth by Jon Champion, The Grip by Ross Dunsmore and Troops by Rory Gibson landed on the 2024 Brit List as well.

In Heart of the Earth, available for producers, a grief-stricken college freshman is presented with an opportunity to bring his brother back from the dead. In order to do so, however, he must find someone else to take his place in the afterlife.

The Grip, with New Regency and Morenike Williams attached, is a youthful noir thriller set in Glasgow. It features elements of obsession, desire, fate and all the classic characters, visual keys and thematic threads of noir titles, but reimagined to explore whether the youth of today will cave in to conformity or turn the world on its head.

Silverprint Pictures is attached to Troops, in which a jewel thief on the lam from a vengeful employer is drawn into running a dysfunctional rural scout troop. He propels the troop to new heights, but his pst catches up with him.

Hungry Joe by Paul Holbrook & Sam Dawe, Lovesong by Sarah Morgan and Lucy Negro by Azuka Oforka all received ten recommendations to make the list.

The thriller/horror Hungry Joe follows a impoverished single mother as she struggles to hold on to her sanity when she is forced into extreme measures to satisfy her son’s insatiable, inhuman appetite. Studio Pow is attached as a producer.

Lovesong, with The Imaginarium as a producer, is a folk horror script in which an elderly goth who is grieving the loss of his husband is struck by an overwhelming fear of death until he meets a mysterious hag in the woods. An unlikely friendship blossoms between the two.

Available for producers is Lucy Negro, a historical drama set in Elizabeth England that is inspired by the controversial theory pertaining to Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets.

“It’s been fantastic to see, over the last year, the great success of past Brit List alumni–from Chris Andrews’ recent BIFA nomination for Bring Them Down (which appeared on The Brit List in 2018 as Shepherd), to last year’s Brit List writer, Karla Marie Sweet’s work with our sponsor Audible on her book, Another Life, which was released as an Audible Original in September, to name but a few,” said Alexandra Arlango, founder and director of The Brit List.

“This year, 40 percent of The Brit List scripts are feature films, more than any other years since the list became a platform for both TV and film,” Arlango continued. “This continues a trend we saw beginning last year, and I’m delighted that feature scripts seem to be flourishing.

“All the writers who have made it onto The Brit List 2024 have distinctive, exciting voices. The Brit List is committed to all our writers–not only with the annual unveiling event in London each year, but also our carefully curated six-month program that informs and introduces them to industry professionals who will give them an overview of, and grounding in, the film and TV industries both here and in the U.S.”