When Welsh journalist Gareth Jones traveled to Soviet Ukraine in 1933, he casually ate an orange in a train at the beginning of his trip. Once he threw the peel away, to his surprise, fellow Ukrainian passengers grabbed and devoured it in an instant. He didn’t yet know that many of them were desperate to get just a slice of that orange or, in fact, any food.
That was the time of Holodomor, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s mass starvation of at least 3.9 million Ukrainians in 1932–1933, part of the Kremlin’s periodic drives to suppress Ukrainian independence and resistance to Soviet rule. Today, it is widely regarded as genocide.
A new film created as a co-production of Ukraine, Poland and the United Kingdom, “Mr. Jones,” puts a spotlight on the journalist’s courageous coverage of the darkest page in Ukrainian history.
The picture’s director, Polish Oscar-nominated filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, says that she felt it was her duty to bring this crucial story to the screen.
“It’s very important to speak in an artistic way about these communist crimes, which practically have been unpunished and, unfortunately, very often are forgotten and forgiven,” Holland said during a press conference on Nov. 27 in Kyiv.
The movie premiered at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival in February and hit Ukrainian theaters on Nov. 28. It also has wide international distribution.
Although the Holodomor was a horrifying crime against humanity, the international community appears to be widely unaware of it, mainly because of Soviet and later Russian propaganda that denied its existence. “Mr. Jones” has a chance to shed light on the tragedy and become as significant for Ukrainians as “Schindler’s List” has been for Jewish people.
Stalin’s gold
The picture follows 27-year-old Jones, a well-educated and ambitious journalist who has a sharp eye for political intrigue. By 1933, he had already proved himself as a distinguished professional after conducting an interview with Adolf Hitler. Back then, Jones predicted the horrors the Nazi tyrant would bring to the world. He was tempted to decode the secret of another dictator of the time, Stalin, and the formula behind the prosperous Soviet economy that was widely called a worker’s paradise. So Jones traveled to Moscow, having received a visa partly because of the connections he had made as a foreign affairs advisor to former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
First determined to get an interview with Stalin, Jones shifts his focus upon arrival in Moscow when he finds out that the foreign journalists are restricted to the city and are kept away from Ukraine in particular. So Jones takes a risk and slips into the tabooed land to discover the man-made starvation that the Soviet authorities tried to keep a secret and that explained the economic growth.
Oscar-nominated Polish director Agnieszka Holland speaks about her new movie, “Mr. Jones,” at a press conference on Nov. 27, 2019 in Kyiv. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Jones travels to Stalino, a town in eastern Ukraine now known as Donetsk, where his mother worked as a tutor at the turn of the 20th century. He heard from his mother that Ukraine was an agricultural land with very fertile black soil called chernozem. The Ukrainian peasants, however, couldn’t make use of the harvest chernozem gave because of the collectivization policy that Stalin implemented. The policy canceled private property, brought all land under state-controlled collective farms and set unrealistic grain harvest goals. They had been, nonetheless, achieved by forcing people to give out all the grain they had and leaving them with nothing to eat.
“Grain is Stalin’s gold,” one of the characters says in the movie.
Yet Stalin’s policy targeted Ukraine not only because of its agricultural capability. It also was ethnic cleansing aimed to destroy the especially rebellious and freedom-loving nation that could possibly pose risks for the unity of Soviet republics.
Holland directed several films depicting the atrocities of the 20th century. She says that they made her somewhat of an expert in crimes against humanity, which is why she often receives scripts focusing on those. She didn’t get involved in any of them for a while because working on the subjects of that kind is too painful, she says. However, it wasn’t the case with “Mr. Jones.”
Written by Andrea Chalupa, a U.S. journalist and author of Ukrainian origin, the script “grabbed” Holland with its powerful and non-conventional storytelling, its subject and relevance.
Holland says that the evidence of the Holodomor is largely unknown and many innocent victims of communist crimes never entered the global consciousness.
“It’s wrong,” she said. “The impact of Holodomor on the Ukrainian reality is bigger than the world can imagine,” she added.
The film brought together three countries to produce, which helped to accommodate a stellar international cast, including Britain’s James Norton and Vanessa Kirby and U. S. actor Peter Sarsgaard. Ukrainians played several secondary roles.
The three-nation co-production also broadened the geography of shooting locations, which include Scotland, Poland and several cities and villages in Ukraine.
The movie’s budget reached over $9 million with about 20 percent of it coming from Ukraine’s State Film Agency.
Created as a co-production of Ukraine, Poland and the United Kingdom, new film “Mr. Jones” brings together a stellar international cast. (Courtesy)
Famine horror
The second chapter of the film portrays Jones’ journey to Ukraine. By the time he arrives there in 1933, the famine has reached a frightening stage. Gaunt and desperate, people fight for a loaf of bread that the authorities “generously” give out once in a while. They eat cooked tree bark, while all the other plants remain dead after a frosty winter. Some drop dead right on the street, while their children become orphans. Others find themselves doing the unbelievable — eating fellow humans.
Some spine-chilling scenes get very tense and graphic, but that was exactly the reality for Ukrainians at the time. Holland says that filming these scenes wasn’t easy either.
“We’ve been doing it with a lot of inner emotions but at the same time with some technological cold,” she said.
The weather conditions in the villages of Zhytomyr and Chernihiv oblasts, where they were shooting, were also rough, with temperatures reaching 20 degrees below zero Celsius. But Holland said it actually helped them.
“Somehow we didn’t feel that we were pretending,” she said. “We felt that this loneliness and silence in those abandoned villages is real.”
British actor James Norton speaks to the media at the Ukrainian premiere of his new film “Mr. Jones” on Nov. 27, 2019, in Kyiv. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Through his trip, Jones gets to experience the life of Ukrainians at the time — he himself suffers from hunger, eats bark and freezes in the snowy frigid weather. In one of the episodes, a group of tiny children surround Jones to sing him a song about Stalin and how hungry and cold they are. Their thin and almost lifeless voices will be stuck in Jones’ ears for a while.
Norton says that he thoroughly prepared for the leading role by meeting with Jones’ relatives and reading his diary. It was later in the shooting, however, when the story struck him in a special way. In one scene, Jones joins the line to get bread and speaks to a woman, who reveals to him that millions have already died of famine. The family of the actress who played that role suffered from the Holodomor.
“She was incredibly emotional,” Norton said at the press conference. “It meant the whole process was deeply poignant.”
Value of truth
“Mr. Jones” precisely reconstructs the features of the Soviet totalitarian regime with its surveillance, repressions and ubiquitous fear. It also shows the total absence of free speech or independent media and the limited conditions that foreign reporters had to work in. Scared to be murdered, like some of their colleagues, foreigners compromised with their conscience and wrote pieces in favor of Stalin. But some of them went even further, such as Walter Duranty, the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times, who curated the foreign media in the Soviet capital and received a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories from there.
Jones stood out as one of a few journalists who were determined to adhere to the core pillar of their profession.
“I don’t have an agenda, unless you call truth an agenda,” Jones says in the movie.
Well aware of the risks he faces, Jones issues a press release about his observations as soon as he leaves the Soviet Union. He later fights hard to publish his investigation about the Holodomor. At the time, the vast majority of correspondents reporting from Moscow, including respected Duranty, contradicted Jones’ claims. In addition, many media sympathized with the idealistic communist ideas, which made it no easier to get his story published.
Because of his persistence and true dedication, Jones became the first journalist to publicize the Holodomor as it was under his own name. Two years later, he paid the highest price for that, his life.
Today, in the time of information chaos and fake news spread by bogus media, often financed by authoritarian countries like Russia, “Mr. Jones” emphasizes the value of true journalism.
Norton says that after starring in the movie, his respect for media grew much greater.
“I took for granted their role and their pursuit for truth and how hard that is, particularly right now,” he said.
For his exceptional service to Ukraine, in 2008, the country posthumously presented the Ukrainian Order of Merit for Jones at a ceremony in Westminster Central Hall in London. Another British journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, whose reports about the Holodomor were published with censorship and under a fake name, was also awarded.
At the premiere screening of “Mr. Jones” on Nov. 27 in Kyiv, Ukraine presented another order for efforts to tell the truth about the Holodomor. This time, the country awarded Holland with the Order of Princess Olga.
Anatoliy Maksymchuk, Ukraine’s first deputy minister of culture, youth and sports, said that truth needs protection today and that Ukraine is grateful to Holland for doing that.
“It is a major contribution to our history,” he said.
“Mr. Jones” in Ukrainian cinemas starting from Nov. 28.
