The Angelmakers

Time is taking its toll on the little village of Nagyrev in rural Hungary: young people are moving away, there is no cinema, no entertainment except for hitting the bottle, and the buildings are dilapidating. The ones who stay are mostly old people who still remember a dark chapter in the history of the region: in 1929, a murder series comes to light. 51 women are suspected of having poisoned their husbands and other relatives, 140 people in all, using arsenic taken from flypaper. In her careful reconstruction of this hair-raising case, the director draws on the tales of the villagers, which tell of a time when wives had to bear anything. But Nagyrev’s younger women have learned quite a bit since.