by FilmInk Staff
Eighty years after the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, the attack is being developed as a five-part limited drama series.
Film United’s Veronika Lencová and Rick McCallum Board King David Hotel Bombing Series “12:37” as Pilot Takes Top Script Prizes at Two U.S. Festivals
The five-part limited drama series from writer-producer Michael John Fedun (The Devil’s Double, Emperor) won the Leo Award for Best Screenplay at the DaVinci International Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize for Best Teleplay at the Richmond International Film Festival on the same weekend.
Veronika Lencová, founder and managing director of Prague-based Film United, has boarded 12:37 — The King David Hotel as producer. She partners with creators Michael John Fedun, the Canadian-Dutch writer-producer, and Nick Schönfeld on a five-part multilingual limited drama series about the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel on July 22, 1946, the deadliest attack on British rule in Palestine.
Lencová produces with Film United’s Rick McCallum (Star Wars: Episodes I–III, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles). Fedun created the series with Schönfeld and wrote all five episodes.
THE AWARDS
The announcement follows 12:37 winning two awards in one weekend. On September 26 the pilot script received the Leo Award for Best Screenplay, the top honour in its category, at the eighth DaVinci International Film Festival in Los Angeles, where professional actors performed scenes from it live at AMC The Grove.
| “12:37 took our screenwriting Leo, our highest honor in the category,” said Chadwick Pelletier, founder and CEO of the DaVinci International Film Festival. |
On September 27 the 15th Richmond International Film Festival in Virginia awarded Fedun its 2026 Grand Jury Prize for Best Teleplay.
| “The story is so well written, and the tie-ins of history to what is happening today are fascinating,” said Heather Waters, producer and CEO of the Richmond International Film Festival. |
THE HISTORY
The King David Hotel was both a grand hotel and the headquarters of British rule in Palestine: kitchens and service corridors below, guests and staff at its heart, the British Secretariat above. On the morning of July 22, 1946 a cell of the Irgun, a Jewish underground militia, carried seven milk churns of explosives into the basement.
Three warnings were phoned in, but the building was never evacuated. At 12:37, the bomb exploded and the south wing of the King David collapsed with everyone still inside. Ninety-one people died. The British condemned it as terrorism. The Irgun called it an act of war. This year marks the attack’s 80th anniversary.
THE SERIES
Over the course of five episodes, 12:37 replays the attack through interlocking perspectives: the bombers, the hotel staff, the British officials upstairs and the Palestinian Arabs trying to survive in a divided city. The outcome is known from the first minute. The tension comes from watching a working city fail to understand what is already moving through it.
| “Ninety-one people died in a building that had been warned three times. The series does not ask who was right. It asks who paid,” said Fedun. “Two festivals on opposite coasts of the United States chose the script on the same weekend. That tells us the story travels. The next job is building the production around it, and Veronika is the partner to do that with.” |
| “There wasn’t one version of that day. The people who planted the bomb, the people who worked in the hotel and the people who governed from upstairs each walked into the King David that morning for their own reasons, and with their own idea of what was happening,” said Schönfeld. “To do the story justice, we felt we had to tell it through all of them.” |
| “This is international television by nature: multilingual, period, precise about the world it recreates, and made for a global audience. Michael and Nick brought us five finished scripts and a structure that holds from every side of the event,” said Lencová. “We are now assembling the creative and international production package that will bring the series to the screen.” |
| “The central concept, that tragedy unfolds not because warnings were absent but because of how the warnings were dealt with, is exactly the kind of thinking that elevates this beyond a conventional historical piece,” said McCallum. “The structure is ambitious and disciplined, and the depth of research gives the world credibility and weight.” |
Film United and Fedun are currently packaging the series for international production. The pilot is hosted on the Black List, where industry members can read it at twelvethirtyseven.com/read. Legal affairs are handled by Harris Tulchin & Associates.
FORMAT 5 x 60 minutes. English, Hebrew, Arabic and French.
CREATED BY Michael John Fedun and Nick Schönfeld
WRITTEN BY Michael John Fedun
STORY BY Nick Schönfeld and Michael John Fedun
PRODUCED BY Veronika Lencová and Rick McCallum
PRODUCTION COMPANY Film United, Prague
STATUS In development. All five episodes are written.
ABOUT FILM UNITED
Founded and led by Veronika Lencová, Film United has spent more than a decade producing and servicing international film and television from Prague, including A United Kingdom, Britannia, Blade Runner 2099, Get Millie Black, Army of Thieves, Hanna and The Defeated. filmunited.cz
ABOUT MICHAEL JOHN FEDUN
Michael John Fedun is a Canadian-Dutch writer and producer based in the Netherlands. His producing credits include two films directed by Lee Tamahori: The Devil’s Double, starring Dominic Cooper (Sundance Film Festival and Berlin, 2011), and Emperor, starring Adrien Brody. He was named one of European Film Promotion’s Producers on the Move at the Cannes Film Festival.
ABOUT NICK SCHÖNFELD
Nick Schönfeld is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker with a strong interest in the intersection of history and fiction, who has written for NPR, the BBC and Al Jazeera. He is a fellow of the International Women’s Media Foundation and a Pulitzer Center grantee as well as a GLAAD award-winner
