Peter Moffat is forging a TV adaptation of UK journalist Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist with Mood production outfit Bonafide Films.
The Your Honor and Criminal Justice BAFTA winner is onboard to write the show telling the astonishing, true-life story of how Rudolf Vrba, a 19-year-old Slovakian Jew, along with fellow inmate Fred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz to warn the world about the Holocaust. The pair’s report led to the saving of 200,000 Budapest Jews from immediate deportation to Auschwitz. The project is not yet attached to a network and Bonafide has secured rights for TV.
Freedland is a highly-regarded British journalist who mainly writes on politics and international affairs for The Guardian but has also penned numerous works of fiction, some of which are under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.
Margery Bone’s London-based Bonafide has previously worked with Moffat on BBC drama The Last Post, which starred Jessie Buckley in a family stationed in the Middle East during the 1960s Aden Emergency. The indie recently struck an investment and distribution deal with BBC Studios. Bonafide also made Mood, the BBC’s BAFTA-winning adaptation of Nicôle Lecky’s play.
“Jonathan Freedland’s conclusion that Rudolf Vrba deserves to ‘stand alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler and Primo Levi in the first rank of stories that define the Shoah’ is hard to argue with,” said Moffat. “It’s a great privilege to be asked to adapt this profoundly moving work”
EPs are Moffat, Bob Bookman, Freedland, Jonny Geller, Bone, Tom Dunbar and Zander Levy. Freedland is represented by Jonny Geller from Curtis Brown and Peter Moffat is represented by Charles Walker at United Agents. Nick Marston negotiated the film and TV rights for the book on behalf of Curtis Brown and James Jackson of JL Media on behalf of Bonafide.