Mr. Jones is the true story of a Welsh journalist’s attempt to expose a genocidal famine carried out by the Soviets in Ukraine during the early 1930s.
James Norton plays young reporter Gareth Jones who went to cover the so-called modernization of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
So, press the top left play button on the above feature image so the trailer can pop up for you to watch.
Finding all not so well in the so-called workers’ paradise, he then heard disturbing ‘rumors’ of a state-induced famine being carried out in rebellious Ukraine.
Unlike Stalin-apologist Walter Duranty — The New York Times bureau chief in Moscow played by Peter Sarsgaard — Jones would report on the famine known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, “death by hunger.”
Mr. Jones is directed by Agnieszka Holland who earlier directed the World War II drama Europa Europa which won a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1991. She said it felt like a moral duty to make the film.
“We wanted to describe the whole mechanism of Jones entering consecutive circles of hell, confronting brutal reality with his idealism, youthfulness and courage, in an evocative way, yet simply and straightforwardly,” Holland said in a statement.
“No journalistic and informative obviousness, no sentimental blackmail and explicit happy ending. Nobody wanted to listen to the truth about Stalin’s atrocities, which Jones exposed,” she said.
It’s estimated that 7-10 million Ukrainians were killed during the famine of 1932-33.
The Soviets always denied what Stalin orchestrated, and the tragedy only became widely known after the Soviet Union fell apart in the early 1990s.
See Holland, Norton and Sarsgaard being interviewed below.