Mr. Jones

141 minutes • 2019 • 6.9

Award-winning film about World War II with James Norton (War and Peace) in the lead role. Based on a true story.

Agnieszka Holland's biographical masterpiece highlights the unknown Welsh journalist Gareth Jones' (1905-1935) and his dangerous investigations into the Soviet famine of Holodomor in the years 1932-33.

Mr. Jones is about the journalist Gareth Jones, whose mission was to report to Western media on Stalin's modernization of the Soviet Union. During his stay in the Soviet Union, Jones reveals the Holodomor, "extinction by famine", which killed millions of people in Soviet Ukraine through, among other things, failed agricultural policies and the sale of agricultural raw materials to finance industrialization. Jones secretly travels around Ukraine, reporting on the famine. However, the catastrophe was dismissed politically both in the West and in the Kremlin, as the political desire was to maintain a good relationship with the Soviet Union as a counterweight to Hitler-Germany. George Orwell's novel Animal Farm is said to be based on Jones' reports.

The film premiered during the Berlin Film Festival. It has received good reviews, including for Holland's narrative style and time color, in addition to the use of Soviet propaganda as part of the visual presentation that emphasizes contemporary unrest and skepticism.