NZIFF Film Review: "Mr Jones" (2019).

"The untold story of the man who risked his life for the truth." This is Mr. Jones. This drama film directed by Agnieszka Holland and written by Andrea Chalupa. The film follows a Welsh journalist who breaks the news of the famine in the Soviet Union in the western media in the early 1930s.

One of the two great shadows the threatened the mythology of "Socialist achievement" was none other than The Holodomor (derived from the Ukrainian phrase of "to kill by starvation"). This was a man-made famine that killed approximately seven million in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. The famine saw villages wiped out, people eating domestic pets, grass, next year's crops, and even fresh corpses. Today, despite even after official commemorations were made in 1993 for the sixtieth anniversary, the Russian government continues to acknowledge the Famine only as a minor 'national' tragedy. Many Ukrainians have sought to characterise the Famine as an act of mass genocide. The Famine inevitably destroyed the social and cultural reservoir of the Ukrainian identity and left a weak traditional populist Ukrainian nationalism. Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement.

The first journalist to publicise the existence of the Famine in the Western world was the Welsh journalist Gareth Richard Vaughn Jones (13/08/1905 - 12/08/1935). On his return to Berlin on 29 March 1933, he issued his press release. His report was met with controversy, as the intelligentsia of the time was still in sympathy with the Soviet regime. On 13 May, Jones published a strong rebuttal, standing by his report. This resulted in Jones being informed that he was banned from ever visiting the Soviet Union again. Banned from the Soviet Union, Jones embarked to the Far East on a "Round-the-World Fact-Finding Tour" in late 1934. Upon travelling through Kalgan, after being detained and instructed by Japanese forces in Manchuko, He and a German journalist were captured by bandits for ransom. The German journalist was released after two days, but 16 days later the bandits shot Jones on the eve of his 30th birthday. It was strongly suspected that Jones' murder was engineered by the Soviet NKVD, as revenge for the international embarrassment created by Jones.

The film stars James Norton as Jones, Vanessa Kirby as Ada Brooks, Peter Sarsgaard as Walter Duranty, Joseph Mawle as George Orwell, and Kenneth Cranham as Lloyd George. Taut performances were elicited from the strong cast. The distinguished and hardworking cast is one of the film's greatest strength.

Mr. Jones is a harrowing stomach-churning of a film. It satisfies thanks to the intensity of the performances and for the objective criticism of the atrocities committed by Stalin and the Soviet Union. This harrowing, engrossing, claustrophobic, robust and arduous drama is often dramatically disturbing and literally hard to watch. It is a harrowing tale, but one that speaks to humankind's capacity for truth and justice, to fight on in the face of terrible cruelty.

Simon says Mr. Jones receives:

Also, see my NZIFF review for Meeting Gorbachev.