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KJ Williams - Screenwriter
Stories about people who make the right decision and must live with the harm that follows.
Screenplays and limited series exploring responsibility after irreversible loss.
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Feature · 97 pages
​A London engineer breaks a government secrecy order to warn that the Underground will flood. Her video saves thousands. The crowds it creates kill twenty-six people, including a nine-year-old girl. She carries both.
A hydraulic engineer's model says the Northern Line pump system will fail during an unprecedented storm. A structural engineer who has walked the tunnels every week for three years says it won't. Both have data. Both are credible. The government must decide before the disagreement resolves.
The Official Secrets Act binds her. She cannot stay silent. What follows tracks twelve hours across a briefing room, a kitchen table, a monitoring suite, and the stations where the consequences land. They land on people who were never consulted and never warned.
Contemporary London · Procedural tragedy
Limited Series · 7 Episodes
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A prince-astronomer proves a comet will destroy his kingdom. His mother's plan would save more lives, but he warns the public anyway, because he cannot know while others don't. His warning saves thousands and kills thousands.
When a comet threatens an ancient kingdom, a queen's silence and her son's warning prompt an evacuation that saves 18,000 people. Every decision along the way kills someone. A military commander executes prisoners by name rather than leaving them to drown unseen. An archivist chooses between medicine and poetry with a sunset deadline and two crates. A carpenter who tests every joint with a two-second gesture is drawn fairly in a lottery and crossed out by a prince who never looked at him.
Eleven years later, a five-year-old boy sits at the base of a monument, tracing carved names with his finger, mispronouncing a dead woman's name. The man who put her there watches from the darkness. He does not correct the boy.
Zep Tepi, Egypt · 10,500 BC · Epic mythic tragedy
Limited Series · 6 Episodes
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In an ancient mining colony, one administrator's reforms halve the death rate. The system distributes his methods, makes him the only person who has to care, and when a directive arrives that will kill people, he implements it because under anyone else, more would die.
Eight hundred feet underground, humans work twelve-hour shifts in passages five and a half feet high. Above them, the administrative system runs with industrial efficiency: casualty columns, output projections, replacement requisitions. One administrator learns every worker's name. His reforms cut the death rate from 2.4 to 0.8 percent. His superior's assessment is that he has made the machine more durable.
The series spans decades. It tracks how conscience enters a system, how a system absorbs the products of conscience without absorbing the conscience itself, and what persists after the person who cared is gone. A four-year-old girl braiding cord in a doorway grows into the woman holding the count at the mine entrance thirty years later.
The Abzu Mines · Pre-Sumerian · Industrial tragedy
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Projects
Approach
These stories return to variations of the same question: what does it cost when defensible decisions land on people who had no part in making them? What remains once the arithmetic is correct and the dead have names?
The work is structured around two pressures. In stories of moral necessity, an individual must decide. They do. People die. The responsibility remains concentrated. There is no villain to blame, no error to correct. In stories of moral substitution, responsibility dissolves into systems. Outcomes improve, casualties fall, safeguards multiply, and yet no one is left to carry the harm that still occurs.
Across different settings, the work draws on the dramatic tradition of Greek tragedy. It is the collision of legitimate obligations that produces irreversible harm. The work asks what that collision looks like.
Read more about the approach to tragedy. →
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