Mr. Jones Press Book

MR. JONES

PRESS BOOK

“Powerful. Bold and heartfelt” "One of the most powerful films at “James Norton brings his A-game to this year’s Berlinale…a fiery epic" this film, giving a muscular, “James Norton stars in a sympathetic performance” breakthrough leading role” “A picture with sinew and strength” “Holland directs the film with a whomping energy that…is incredibly

powerful”

"Compelling (...) Soul-stirring" "A gripping film that needs to be "James Norton’s plucky, deeply seen" invested performance" "Haunting, symphonic sequence for sheer emotional impact and narrative

intensity" "James Norton is terrific as Gareth Jones"

"A mighty drama" "(Vanessa) Kirby as always is a magnetic presence" "A beautiful film" "Technically impeccable" "The story it tells is so strong"

"The central story packs enough weight, both narratively and

emotionally, to make this essential for outlets on the cusp of "Extremely powerful" art-house and quality mainstream" "An eye-opening, utterly "A voyage drama that’s executed engrossing and urgent piece of fine impressionistically" filmmaking" "Mr. Jones is impressive in almost

every single way. Holland’s direction “Sheer beauty” is first-rate, the pacing never sluggish and the images are simply stunning” “Norton is superb in the title role – a career-making turn and shines bright in "Holland launches one of her most every scene. Vanessa Kirby also compelling efforts in years" dazzles (...) while Saarsgard neatly nearly steals the whole show as Duranty, his best performance for absolutely ages"

"Agnieszka Holland’s moving "James Norton takes on the role of biopic Mr. Jones was a highlight of Jones with convincing charm" the competition line-up" "The bold style of director "With a magnificent performance Agnieszka Holland, infusing a bleak by Norton and a deliciously ripe turn moment of history with surprising from Peter Sarsgaard, Holland has verve" unearthed a too-little-known story and presents it beautifully"

"Much to be admired in Agnieszka Holland’s Mr. Jones…featuring a "A compelling narrative...strong stand-out performance by James pacing" Norton as the eponymous lead" "James Norton is an infinitely watchable leading man whose nuanced, emotionally-charged performance conveys the titular journalist’s doggedness and heart and contributes largely to the film’s impact" "A harrowing tale…James Norton gives a convincing turn as Welsh journalist Gareth Jones"

“A truly amazing tale which deserves to be told"

REVIEWS

Mr Jones review – newsman's heroic journey into a Soviet nightmare ****

By Peter Bradshaw – 11th February 2019

Agnieszka Holland’s powerful drama stars James Norton as the real-life Welsh journalist who uncovered Stalin’s genocidal famine in Ukraine

Agnieszka Holland’s Mr Jones is a bold and heartfelt movie with a real Lean- ian sweep. First-time screenwriter Andrea Chalupa has been inspired by her grandfather from eastern Ukraine to script this forthright, valuable drama about Stalin’s genocidal famine there, and the courageous Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who first brought it to the world’s attention in the 1930s. This was despite real personal danger in journeying there covertly – and the subsequent disparagement of Stalin’s lickspittle New York Times correspondent in Moscow, Walter Duranty, a man whom posterity has revealed to be a singularly useless idiot.

James Norton brings his A-game to this film, giving a muscular, sympathetic performance as Jones, the idealist intellectual and man of action from Barry in Wales, who has a liking for reciting the medieval Welsh poem The Battle of the Trees and never removes his sweetly owlish spectacles. Peter Sarsgaard is the creepy Duranty and Joseph Mawle has a recurring cameo as George Orwell who was said to be inspired by Jones’s work and might even have named “Mr Jones”, the proprietor of Animal Farm, after him. Jones and Orwell don’t appear to have met in person, but the film imagines a lunch encounter, based on the fact that they shared a London literary agent: Leonard Moore. The movie has also created what appear to be fictional invention composites: chiefly a colleague of Duranty’s called Ada Brooks, played by Vanessa Kirby (Princess Margaret from the Netflix series The Crown).

Holland’s film begins slowly, even unassumingly as young Jones – having already made a splash by interviewing Hitler – uses his London government contacts with David Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham) to get official permissions to travel to the Soviet Union, on a mission to interview Stalin and discover the truth about the USSR’s colossal economic expansion and its apparently triumphant five-year plan. At first, Jones is restricted to Moscow, condemned to hang around the louche and cynical journo-expat scene presided over there by Duranty. But then he escapes to make a dangerous and deeply unofficial trip to Ukraine, which is where his nightmare begins.

At first, the movie is weirdly like The Third Man, with Jones as the Holly Martins figure, the writer in a strange town, having been promised something interesting by someone who is disturbingly no longer around. But by the end of the film it is more like Heart of Darkness. He befriends Ada (Kirby) who wearily tolerates the secret service man following her around as her “big brother”, and Jones is unnerved by a man at one of Duranty’s creepy parties saying that the ennui- stricken hedonistic atmosphere is like Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.

When Jones arrives in the desolate, snowy wastes of eastern Ukraine, he finds out the truth about what Stalin is doing – and perhaps the fact that this is still not well known adds to the horror. There is an excellent and disturbing scene in which Jones is confronted by five tiny children in snowy woodland who sing an eerie song to him about Stalin, and about how cold and hungry and yet loyal they are. It has a sinister, hypnotic effect. Jones is to become tormented by hunger, even gnawing at tree bark. Finally a thin-faced family share their supper with him, which turns out to be the worst horror of all.

The movie is partly about Jones’s personal nightmare and his anguish when he was at first disbelieved. But it is also about his final vindication, which perhaps doesn’t have the same power although it’s a necessary part of the story. Holland’s movie really lets rip in the final act, the ordeal in the wasteland of Ukraine. She has a real story to tell – a story that isn’t told enough – and a single, compelling and likable character with which to tell it. It’s a picture with sinew and strength. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/11/mr-jones-review-agnieszka- holland-james-norton-berlin-film-festival

Mr Jones – first look review

By Ian Mantgani – 11th February 2019

Agnieszka Holland’s biopic of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones is one of the most powerful films at this year’s Berlinale.

In 2006, a plaque was unveiled at Aberystwyth University for Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who died in relative obscurity at the age of 29. It was a small, defiant recognition of a man who had been shamed in his time for doing the right thing. Jones had written of Stanlinist inefficiency, particularly the Holodomor, the famine in Ukraine that killed up to 7.5 million people between 1932 and 1933, at a time when the US was preparing to cool relations with the USSR and conventional journalistic wisdom was to praise communism as imperfect but brave.

Mr Jones, directed by Agnieszka Holland and written by Andrea Chalupa, is a fiery epic paying further tribute to this forgotten figure of history, and stoking the coals of remembrance as the forces of authoritarianism are, as they say, back in the news. The young British actor James Norton stars in a breakthrough leading role as Jones, a bespectacled, thorough, tee-totalling foreign advisor to prime minister David Lloyd George. Fresh from interviewing Hitler and warning that this angry little man may have grand designs, Jones finds himself out of a government job as economic crisis causes government cuts.

Idealistic, determined and with a good working knowledge of the Russian language thanks to his language-teacher mother, Jones then travels to Moscow with the intent of interviewing Stalin and encouraging the British government to make an alliance. His dialogue early in the film describes the premier as, “a man who makes miracles,” and notes that, “the Soviets have built more in five years than our government can manage in a hundred.”

Of course, the fantasy begins to unravel on the ground, as Jones’ movements are restricted and his main journalistic contact is disappeared. The real Jones travelled to Russia several times in the early 1930s and wrote a sequence of articles trickling out details from multiple sources; in Chalupa’s condensed, semi-fictionalised account, Jones escapes from his guard on a train to Ukraine, and embarks on a snowy walking tour of horrors where he sees babies on death carts, grain rerouted on trains to Moscow, villages of abandoned houses, families eating human flesh and children wandering around like zombies singing folk songs in tribute to the dead.

The summarisation is the closest Mr Jones gets to simple ghoulish bad taste – there are times when Norton’s wandering makes the film feel like it’s shoehorned a PG-rated Son of Saul into a slam-bang digest of a life. Holland directs the film with a whomping energy that, for all its unseemly flash, is incredibly powerful. In one moment, Jones peels a brightly coloured orange in a train full of peasants who huddle in near-monochrome, Holland evoking the little red dress in Schindler’s List. There are other flourishes, particularly when Jones first gets to Moscow: fast cutting interspersed with closeups of machinery; big looming sets that give an outsized, surreal impression of Russian architecture; low-angle shots of characters against purple skies, cuts-ins of Sergei Eisenstein, double exposures and a grand score thumping with double-bass.

It’s an energy that distinguishes the film from what could have been a solemn and passé trudge through an overfamiliar segment of 20th century history. Holland has been making films about this time for 40 years, including her 1990 hit Europa Europa, the Oscar-nominated drama about a Jewish teenager who finds himself hiding undercover in the Hitler Youth. Here, she re-energises the vision with the kind of gusto you’d expect from a music video director, and it’s blindsidingly effective.

Chalupa’s script shines a light not only on Jones and the Holodomor, but on a decadent scene of Moscow sex parties that we commonly associate more with Berlin in the Weimar years than Russia under Stalin. Peter Saarsgard is repellently charming and rationalising as Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize- winning New York Times journalist whose own articles, downplaying reports of famine, were used to silence Jones.

Now known as ‘Stalin’s Apologist’, Duranty lived a life stranger than fiction, including a love affair with the English occultist Aleister Crowley. On the side of the angels, there’s also a performance by Joseph Mawle as George Orwell, who was in part inspired by Jones when he wrote ‘Animal Farm’. Some of the most obscure and bizarre details in Mr Jones turn out to be the truest.

Jones found himself relegated to a life back in his remote Welsh village before his untimely death. Duranty lived a long, comfortable existence, and while there were posthumous calls for his Pulitzer to be revoked, it never was. Mr Jones is an outraged cry for reporting facts without an agenda, even if it results in being ostracised, and an insistence that on a long enough timeline, truth will out. In its refutation of fake news, and its portrayal of a world that didn’t know if it would survive the rise of fascism and bolshevism, it unsubtly but rousingly speaks to our current global condition. https://lwlies.com/festivals/mr-jones-berlin-film-festival-review/

‘Mr. Jones’ review: dir. Agnieszka Holland (2019)

By Paul Heath – 11th February 2019

Mr. Jones review: Unspooling at the Berlinale is Agnieszka Holland’s latest, an extremely powerful examination of the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones’ (James Norton) and his journey to the Ukraine pre-World War II where he exposed the devastating Soviet famine of 1932-1933.

You may be forgiven for now knowing about the devastating events on which this film is based – I shamefully didn’t – but Oscar-winning Polish director Holland’s new film is detailed, utterly engrossing and extremely commanding.

The film gets off to a slow start, Andrea Chalupa’s screenplay not willing to rush things, the story picking up on Jones following a recent interview with Adolf Hitler. He’s in Moscow, hoping to score a one-to-one with Joseph Stalin in Ukraine. He waits for his passage by mixing with local ex-pats, including Peter Saarsgard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Duranty, Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times. He eventually manages to get passage into neighbouring Ukraine on an official basis but ends up straying from his companion which is where he starts to see the devastating state of the country. People are clamouring for food. People are starving and, as a result, people are dying. Jones, despite having limited rations, some of which he trades for a warm coat, soon finds himself in the same situation; starved, deep in snow- drenched rural Ukraine.

The film charts not only his journey through the wilderness, but also the constant roadblocks he comes up against as he attempts to publish details about his experience, and the devastating killer that is ravaging the country. Mr. Jones is impressive in almost every single way. Holland’s direction is first- rate, the pacing never sluggish – please don’t baulk at the length 140-minute running time – and the images she and cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk have put on the screen are simply stunning. Naumiuk employs the use of very desaturated look during the scenes where Jones is alone in the wild, and in one memorable moment introduces an orange – as in the fruit – heavy in glorious colour as a ravenous Jones, at the time unaware of the situation he’s just sauntered in to, opening it up to eat in front of a dozen or so hungry locals, packed into a train carriage.

Norton is superb in the title role – a career-making turn and shines bright in every scene. Vanessa Kirby (The Crown) also dazzles in a supporting role as Ada, while Saarsgard neatly nearly steals the whole show as Duranty, his best performance for absolutely ages.

An eye-opening, utterly engrossing and urgent piece of fine filmmaking, focusing on the absolute importance of having a free press, its themes in terms of that still relevant over 80 years on. http://www.thehollywoodnews.com/2019/02/11/mr-jones-review-dir-agnieszka- holland-2019/

Berlin Film Festival review: Mr. Jones ★★★★

By Emma Jones – 11th February 2019

A new film showing at the Berlin Film Festival tells the story of Gareth Jones, a reporter who exposed Stalin, was hushed up, and inspired George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Fake news did not start with the Trump era. Mr Jones, set in 1933, is the story of a Welsh journalist who exposed the Holodomor, a famine caused by Stalin’s agricultural policies in which up to 10 million people died. Jones was accused of being a liar by those with an interest in hushing it up – but later he influenced George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and many of Orwell’s most damning sentences – “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” – punctuate the film.

McMafia’s James Norton is terrific as Gareth Jones, a teetotal, Russian- speaking Cambridge scholar from Barry, south Wales. Jones was a lucky reporter – he made his name after finding himself on an aeroplane with Adolf Hitler, and in possession of an exclusive interview. In the film, directed by Poland’s Agnieszka Holland, off Jones goes to Moscow, ostensibly to try to interview Joseph Stalin too, but he follows his journalist’s nose for a story to slip into Ukraine, where reporters were banned. “Everywhere there is the cry, there is no bread. We are dying,” Jones would later report of his shocking experiences of the starvation he encountered.

Though a Polish production, Mr Jones has a Hollywood-friendly cast to play the trio of lead characters – James Norton, Vanessa Kirby as reporter Ada Brooks and Peter Sarsgaard as Walter Duranty, the British-born Moscow editor of the New York Times, who spits out contempt and cut-glass English vowels with every line. But at 141 minutes, Agnieszka Holland– an Oscar nominee for 1990’s Europa Europa, and whose recent credits include episodes of The Wire – doesn’t move Mr Jones along quickly. Unless that is, she’s artificially speeding up the trains and bicycles bearing Jones’s breaking news, or the man himself, a figure in black running through a stark white palette of Ukrainian snow. It’s like he’s entered a horror film – which at this point, he has.

If Gareth Jones represents the best of journalism, Walter Duranty is the worst – although Sarsgaard plays him so well, he emerges as the more interesting of the two. Duranty accused Jones of lying about his eyewitness report, though history believes the Pulitzer-Prize winner knew about the extent of the famine. Duranty was thought to be close to the Soviet government; others have suggested he was under duress. The moral ambiguity of those with power is represented by the greyness of the surroundings, from the sludge of London, miserable with austerity and ruled by old men whispering in dark corners, to the Soviet housing blocks of Moscow. The lights literally only go on for an avant- garde burlesque party at which Jones is desperately uncomfortable – perhaps because of a naked Peter Sarsgaard greeting him, or simply because its bored debauchery seems symbolic of what happens when journalists try to forget who’s paying them.

Gareth Jones seems so pure that he never quite emerges into three dimensions, and audiences don’t need such heavy hints from Mr Jones to understand this is supposed to be relevant now. Norton-as-Jones’s assertion that reporters have to go after the facts “and not take sides” earned a laugh from the press in Berlin. But the flat denial of an eyewitness account of famine makes one wonder about the Twitterstorm it would provoke in this age; how furiously Jones’s report would be debated.

Holland also shows the desperate desire to believe in Stalin; many intellectuals longed for him to be the antidote to Hitler and simply did not want to believe that his policies had caused such horror. “So there’s no hope then,” George Orwell concludes sadly in the film, when he accepts Jones’s story as true. Yet as long as there are the Gareth Joneses of this world out there, pedalling on his bicycle to bring the truth to the world, there must be. http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190211-berlin-film-festival-review-mr- jones?ocid=global_culture_rss

‘Mr. Jones’: Berlin Review

By Jonathan Romney – 11th February 2019

James Norton is real-life Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, whose 1930s visit to the Ukraine inspired George Orwell’s Animal Farm

Dir. Agnieszka Holland. Poland/Ukraine/UK. 2019. 141mins

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is so familiar as an allegory of 20th century history that it’s a very healthy thing to be reminded of its sources; even if there’s a bit more Mr Orwell here than is really necessary. Agnieszka Holland’s drama Mr Jones tells the story of Gareth Jones, the Welsh reporter whose investigative visit to the USSR, and especially the Ukraine, in the early 1930s provided the hard facts that inspired Orwell’s story. With a cast impressively headed by James Norton, and cinematography that captures the bleakness of winter and deprivation to grimly palatable effect, Holland’s drama comes across in part as a meticulously mounted, sometimes solemn history lesson.

Mr Jones flourishes in a middle section detailing Jones’s journey to report on the Ukrainian famine – the ‘Holodomor’ – that was one of the most notorious horrors of the last century. Academically staid as the film sometimes feels, the central story packs enough weight, both narratively and emotionally, to make this essential for outlets on the cusp of art-house and quality mainstream.

We meet Jones in 1933, working as foreign advisor to British Prime Minister Lloyd George after making his name by scooping an interview with Hitler. Returning to work as a freelance journalist, Jones is determined to go to the USSR and land an interview with Stalin, then much admired for boosting Russian productivity despite the world’s economic depression.

Arriving in Moscow, Jones is welcomed by New York Times Moscow bureau head Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgard), who is a firm believer in the new Russian order, but also a host of luxurious parties awash with drugs, jazz and nudity. Getting some inside information on the way that things are really done in the USSR, thanks to journalist Ada Brooks (Vanessa Kirby), Jones decides to visit Ukraine, where industrial miracles are allegedly happening, but leaves his train en route to go it alone.

It’s at this point that the film really takes off, shifting from a meticulous but somewhat plodding period recreation to a voyage drama that’s executed much more impressionistically. With a muted palette approaches black and white, and a tonal starkness that echoes Bela Tarr and some of the fiction films of Sergei Loznitsa, Jones heads off across a bleak snowbound expanse ruled by horrific starvation, with corpses routinely strewn on the ground. There’s one moment that verges on folkloric kitsch as a group of children sing a song about death and hunger, but the episode is soon given a starkly horrifying twist when Jones takes shelter with an orphaned family and finds out exactly how they’ve survived.

The film’s final third sees Jones back in the UK, struggling to make his story public and have it believed. It’s at this point that he’s introduced to Eric Blair (Joseph Mawle), beginning to make his name as a writer under the name ‘George Orwell’. In fact, we’ve already met Orwell at the start, and it’s one of the film’s weaker ideas to have him intermittently reading choice excerpts from Animal Farm throughout, as if Jones’s story weren’t extraordinary enough to stand on its own. It’s one of few false steps in the film, another being the incongruous montaged use of black-and-white Soviet-era film clips to jazz up Jones’s lengthy train journeys.

Otherwise, Polish veteran Holland (2017’s Spoor, US TV work including Treme and House of Cards) is on authoritative, if not always economical form. The casting is strong, with Norton – a versatile British TV fixture in Happy Valley, Grantchester and McMafia – playing Jones as a determined investigator and observer, but damping down any excessive notes of intrepid heroism.

Sarsgard gives one of the choicest examples to date of the ‘unctuous creep’ mode that is his forte, and Brit doyen Kenneth Cranham offers a bluff but devious Lloyd George. Vanessa Kirby is also good as an expat USSR believer with qualms, although neither her manner nor her appearance seem remotely of the 1930s.

Antoni Komasa-Łazarkiewicz provides music alternately moody and propulsive in a vaguely Glass-ian mode, while the austere cinematography and imposing, sometimes monumental design make the most of Ukrainian and Scottish locations. https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/mr-jones-berlin-review/5136785.article

Berlin film review: ‘Mr. Jones’

By Guy Lodge – 10th February 2019

The story of truth-seeking anti-Soviet journalist Gareth Jones remains compelling through the highs and lows of Agnieszka Holland's overlong biopic.

Director: Agnieszka Holland With: James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, Peter Sarsgaard 2 hours 20 minutes

The story of Gareth Jones is such a fascinating one, built on such intrepid, one- man-against-the-system ideals, that it’s a wonder it hasn’t been filmed into oblivion over the past 80 years. A young Welsh journalist who blew the first public whistle on the Holodomor — the man-made famine of 1932-33 in Soviet Ukraine — only to be broadly discredited by his professional peers and murdered before his 30th birthday, he was the quintessential man who knew too much. “Mr. Jones,” Agnieszka Holland’s suitably absorbing but somewhat stuffy biopic, knows too much in a different sense: neophyte screenwriter Andrea Chalupa’s plainly well-researched script is at such pains to put all its fact-finding on the screen that what should be an urgent political thriller proceeds at a bit of a trudge, its human dimensions not always clear in the ultra- low lighting.

A far stricter edit of this baggy 140-minute film would solve a number of its problems, but the good news is that “Mr. Jones” gets better and more soul- stirring as it goes along. After a particularly murky opening act detailing Jones’s embattled time in Britain’s Foreign Office, things slowly gather pace once he heads for Russia, peaking with a staggering, visceral stretch of survivalist drama in the frozen farmlands of Ukraine — where Holland’s aptitude for skin- prickling visual storytelling finally comes to the fore. James Norton’s plucky, deeply invested performance as Jones is good company even when the film around him is at its most opaque; that asset, plus fine supporting work from Peter Sarsgaard and “The Crown” breakout Vanessa Kirby as more questionably embedded Moscow journos, lends luster to a film that rather hides its commercial light under a bushel.

For the film’s first few minutes, some casual viewers may wonder if they’ve inadvertently wandered into a George Orwell biopic instead: The film opens on Joseph Mawle’s ripe impersonation of the socialist author, clattering away at a typewriter as he develops the idea for “Animal Farm.” A separate arc of the film follows how the novel grew from Orwell’s disillusionment with Stalinism, fed in turn by Jones’s findings — an intriguing aspect of the journalist’s legacy, certainly, but presented here in clunkily literal fashion, right down to corny cutaways of a vexed Orwell whittling wooden models of farmyard animals.

It’s a relief when Jones takes center stage, his valiant lone-wolf credentials established in a scene that finds the 27-year-old — then a foreign advisor to Prime Minister David Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham) — laughed out of the room by smoke-belching cabinet ministers when he suggests that war with Nazi Germany is imminent. (As with the Orwell subplot, Chalupa’s script revels in thick applications of dramatic irony.) He loses his Whitehall job, but secures a journalist’s visa to Russia, certain there’s a bigger story to be found there than the mollifying, pro-Stalin reports being churned out by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writer Walter Duranty (Sarsgaard, cast to slithery perfection). Circumspect British journo Ada Brooks — played by Kirby with vulnerably cracked femme fatale hauteur — offers him sympathetic but ambiguous counsel.

Even Ada doesn’t share Jones’s conviction that Stalin’s brand of socialism is masking mass human suffering beyond the bright lights of Moscow, where Duranty effectively controls global understanding of the region — in between attending to a louche circuit of heroin-fueled society parties. (Chalk up another point the film is loath to make without an extended illustrative set piece.)

Jones’s only recourse is to defy foreign commissar Maxim Litvinov (Krzysztof Pieczynski) and journey to Ukraine himself, where even he is unprepared for the genocidal scale of death and starvation that greets him. His navigation of this ruined winter landscape could be a full film in itself. With Chalupa’s dialogue at last pared to the bone, Holland likewise sheds her fussiest stylistic mannerisms to isolate haunting sensory specifics: the crunch of unpopulated snow, captured in blinding widescreen ribbons by d.p. Tomasz Naumiuk; the piercing wail of an abandoned infant; the palpable cold of every visible surface, raising gooseflesh even in a heated movie theater.

Nothing else in “Mr. Jones” quite matches this haunting, symphonic sequence for sheer emotional impact and narrative intensity, though the perilous aftermath of Jones’ investigation cues a shift into rousing, clenched-fist conspiracy drama. Even when the filmmaking sinks back into relative dourness, Holland and Chalupa deserve credit for not soft-pedaling the politics in a slab of history that could have been blandly packaged as “Imitation Game”-style awards bait, while the film’s expressionist visual style — all vertiginous low angles and vast blankets of shadow, with occasional frantic flurries of handheld lensing — offers challenges of its own. The powerful contemporary resonance of a story that veritably hinges on the dangers of “fake news” and its devastating consequences, meanwhile, hardly needs to be explained. As drama, “Mr. Jones” sometimes struggles to get out of its own way, but its message still lands with concrete force. https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/mr-jones-review-1203134285/

Berlinale first look: Mr. Jones reprises the exposé of Stalin’s Ukrainian genocide

By Nick James – 11th February 2019

Agnieszka Holland’s period biopic honours Welsh journalist Gareth Jones’s muck-raking reporting on the 1930s Holodomor genocide-famine in unsurprising but deft ways.

Agnieszka Holland’s epic about discovering the truth about life in the Soviet Union of the 1930s is a film with a message: that crimes of historical enormity must always be revealed, told and retold. So far, so regular. But the film itself embodies its own message. Its flaws are the flaws of all biopics, its virtues are precisely those of a story in danger of being forgotten unless a big sweeping drama can remind us of what happened, that the Holodomor famine killed millions of Ukrainians while Stalin and his purveyors of fake news – including Western apparatchiks – pretended his five-year plan of forced collectivisation was a huge success.

The feeling of faint dread one gets whenever an earnest costume drama comes along is engendered early here, particularly when we realise the framing device is George Orwell writing Animal Farm (Joseph Mawle playing him nervy and uncertain), and that we have as our main protagonist an earnest young wannabe journalist, Gareth Jones (James Norton makes him an eager and indomitable truth seeker without being showy). But the film proves much more rewarding than this opening intimates.

Kicked out of a job working as an international advisor for Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham), the Russian-speaking Jones goes off to Moscow seeking an answer to the question: how does Stalin do it – how is the Soviet economy apparently doing so well? The prim and ascetic Jones is soon gathered under the sway of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Russian Bureau editor Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard in full sleaze mode), whose decadent parties are not to our Welshman’s taste and are depicted laced with jazz, smack and swaying naked vamps as we have seen in many dramas before. Jones’s romantic interests are better captured by Ada Brooks (Vanessa Kirby), one of Duranty’s more conscientious writers, whose lover, Jones’s friend, has just been conveniently murdered.

Using an altered letter of recommendation from Lloyd George, Jones swings an official trip to the Ukraine by train, but gets his minder drunk and switches trains to a local line where he finds all the passengers are emaciated. This begins the film’s real core, an austere depiction of human misery of considerable scope and power, and which by contrast makes better sense of the more stereotypical opium-dream Moscow scenes. Jones wanders a devastated country littered with frozen corpses and finds every necessary survival practice at work, even the most taboo. What then happens to Jones, as he tries to get the truth out, is a tad procedural and even more melodramatic but the urgent power of what we see helps one to ignore the mechanism.

Only someone as experienced and cine-literate as Holland could have pulled off such a extensively detailed film, one that deftly tells us so much about the context of a largely true-life story while using genre conventions of Soviet propaganda against itself. It’s also a cinephile’s storehouse of nods to Soviet classics as well as films like Three Colours: Red, Citizen Kane and Diamonds of the Night. Even the Animal Farm frame proves more resonant that I expected. Not outstanding by any means but a gripping film that needs to be seen. https://bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews- recommendations/mr-jones-agnieszka-holland-gareth-jones-biopic- reenactment-holodomor-ukraine-famine-genocide-reporting

Review: Mr. Jones

By Bénédicte Prot – 12th February 2019

BERLIN 2019: Agnieszka Holland’s beautiful film links Orwell to the powerful story of the only journalist to denounce the Stalinist regime, despite strong opposition

Little is known about the Welshman Gareth Jones, a young foreign policy adviser to Lloyd George who first interviewed Adolf Hitler on a plane before beginning an investigation into the Soviet Union in the winter of 1933, going on to be only journalist to write about the terrible Holodomor famine in newspapers, a historical event that went on to decimate millions of Ukrainians – resounding and murderous proof that Stalin’s model system, which was praised so highly both on national soil and around the world thanks to propaganda and censorship, was in fact a terrible tragedy.

This particular story is told by Agnieszka Holland in Mr. Jones, which is competing at the 69th Berlin Film Festival, two years after the Polish director won the Silver Bear and Alfred Bauer Awards for Spoor. And she does so by imagining that Jones' courageous gesture inspired George Orwell (Joseph Mawle) to write Animal Farm, who serves as the common thread running through Andrea Chalupa's screenplay, which sees Orwell sat at a table writing his famous novel – the original preface of which openly criticised the self- censorship practiced by the British press, which acted as a Soviet "ally." Playing Jones’ (James Norton) nemesis is Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard), who is invited to Moscow on behalf of the New York Times by Stalin himself, quite a topical character given the cowardice and corruption of modern-day media and the power of misinformation.

After an introductory few scenes in Britain that see the government in denial following Jones' premonitory warnings about Hitler, followed by a long train journey to Moscow, which is encapsulated by one thunderous and brilliantly noisy clatter of the railway lines (and one that evokes the ridiculous task involved in travelling down the phone network to tap into telephone conversations), we are projected into a world that consists of foreign reporters who are cleverly controlled by the Soviet authorities. It is an ostentatious world, full of parties, lust and gargantuan banquets, and one that represents the only image of the USSR that journalists are allowed to see and depict in their articles.

But all of this opulence and hubbub is cruelly cut short by the grievous misery and silence of death that Gareth Jones soon discovers in the second half of the film, and which sees his smooth skin and good looks give way to a wrinkled, grey expression. Indeed, as soon as he leaves the false luxury of the Soviet Union and throws himself into the chilling cold of the Ukrainian winter, he begins to sink, at the risk of his own life, into an empty country that really does represent death itself, where grey emaciated corpses and frozen bodies are piled onto frightful funeral wagons (even a baby ends up on the pile with its late mother, practically dead) and where Jones regularly encounters the bluish emaciated faces of people who are prepared to eat their own dead relatives, faces that will continue to haunt him in the final part of the film, when he returns to Britain. Upon his return, he feels that it his moral duty to make his voice heard, despite various individuals desperately trying to smother him, however, his voice stays with us until the end of the film – yet further evidence of the film’s beautiful sound work.

The film is technically flawless, despite being somewhat classic and lengthy in nature, but the story itself is so powerful and the indignation that results from Jones' descent into horror – a process described by Holland as a passage through the various circles of hell – is so suffocating that we won't be forgetting what he witnessed in Ukraine in a hurry.

Mr. Jones is a co-production between Film Produkcja (Poland), Crab Apple (UK) and Kinorob (Ukraine). International sales are being handled by the London outfit WestEnd. https://www.cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/367979/#cm

Agnieszka Holland's 'Mr Jones' Competes At The Berlinale 2019

By Sheena Scott – 15th February 2019

Gareth Jones was a Welsh journalist who went to the Soviet Union and discovered the famine and death of millions in Ukraine in 1933. He placed his own life in peril trying to reveal this. Agnieszka Holland’s film Mr Jones, competing this year for the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, shades light unto this man’s extraordinary life.

The cinematography in Holland’s film is sheer beauty, particularly in the moments when a ray of light reveals the particles of dust in the air. From the very first instances of the film, the cinematography enhances the tactility of the images. The spectators find themselves in the middle of a sty, as extreme close shots of pigs make us feel the bristles on the pigs’ pink skin. A sense of claustrophobia is felt as the pigs are packed inside the barn with no room to move. In the next shot, a barn is framed amongst a field of dried wheat that are moved like waves by the wind. The camera pans to reveal that this is the view from someone’s window. A man at his typewriter is writing what we can recognize as Animal Farm. The narration from this book will accompany us throughout the film intermittently.

We meet Gareth Jones, played by James Norton, as he is laughed at by politicians at Jones’s warnings of an imminent next great war by Nazi Germany. Dismissed as foreign secretary for Lloyd George, he believes he has a story to write about the Soviet Union as he finds it odd that the USSR is doing so well when the ruble is worth next to nothing. Lloyd George won’t send him there. Jones decides to go on his own. There is a funny scene between him and the visa custom lady, who dismisses him as a wannabe journalist who thinks he’ll be able to interview Stalin. After the secret service overhears a phone call with his journalist friend, Jones is admitted a visa for a week, to stay in the same hotel as his friend. In this hotel, the whole international journalistic community is allowed to stay. There Jones meets Walter Duranty, played by Peter Sarsgaard, who works for The New York Times, and learns that his friend has died, most likely killed by the secret service. In this hotel, Jones discovers the opulent life of these journalists who have orgiastic parties, hosted by Duranty himself. Jones has no interest in this and finds a clever way to escape Moscow to uncover what is happening in Ukraine.

This is a very long film that tried to cram everything that Jones went through in two and a half hours. Holland’s direction is, as with her other films, close to the action. Her films have a way of putting the spectators right in the middle of the action through her multiple uses of close shots with occasional long shots that establish the space in which the characters roam. The incredible sequences when Jones is in Ukraine show the horror and brutality that it must have been. Jones encounters corpses all along his path, which everyone else ignores. Tracked by the authorities, he runs to the woods and stumbles upon the farm that features in a photograph that he has of his mother. It is the same barn as in the opening sequence. There he meets children who take him to their place to eat. He soon discovers that the small bite of meat he is eating is, in fact, one of their brothers who lies dead in the snow. The film has this ability to show horror in the most palpable way.

It is a little unclear at the beginning what the connection is between Orwell and Jones, and the film leaves until near the end to show us that the two met in London. The film suggests here that it is Jones’ experience and story of the reality of the USSR that inspired Orwell to write his famous novel, Animal Farm. After a talk in which Jones reveals the famine and hunger in Ukraine, Orwell asks Jones whether this effaces the notion of an egalitarian society, to which Jones replies that whether egalitarian or capitalist, the system ends up being exactly the same. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sheenascott/2019/02/15/agnieszka-hollands-mr- jones-competes-at-the-berlinale-2019/#161c8c2b7e74

Mr. Jones | 2019 Berlin International Film Festival review ★★★

By Nicholas Bell – 10th February 2019

Truth Be Told: Holland Revisits the Horror of the Holodomor

Polish director Agnieszka Holland returns to a subject matter favored in her most memorable offerings—lost narratives from the WWII era. Her latest, Mr. Jones, recuperates the investigative journalism of British reporter Gareth Jones, who defied his superiors and his colleagues to uncover the secret behind Stalin’s economic surge despite the bankruptcy of the Kremlin during world economic collapse. Eventually, the truth behind the genocide and desecration in the Ukraine at the hands of Stalin’s Soviets would come to be revealed as the Holodomor, a horrific extermination which became conveniently eclipsed by Germany’s Holocaust, which required the participation of Russia to overcome. Holland launches one of her most compelling efforts in years with this reenactment, a search for justice which would mar the reputation of pro- Stalinist New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Walter Duranty and inspire George Orwell to pen Animal Farm.

In the early 1930s, tenacious Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (James Norton) finds his troubling predictions of war with Germany to fall on deaf ears following an interview with Hitler, a chance opportunity which allowed him significant notoriety as a novice. While budget cuts find him removed from his service as foreign advisor to Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham), he is allowed an opportunity to travel to Moscow to request to interview Stalin in order to discover how Russia has been able to afford its current spending spree despite rumours of the country’s failed economic fever dream, the First five-year plan (implemented from 1928 to 1932). Arriving to find his friend and fellow journalist has been killer under suspicious circumstances, Jones is tipped off on his colleague’s investigation into the Ukraine (where journalists are not allowed) by New York Times writer Ada Brooks (Vanessa Kirby), who works for the celebrated Stalin supporter, reporter Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard). Finagling his way onto a train from Moscow to Kharkov, Jones escapes his handler and discovers the supreme horrors of the decimation enacted upon the Ukrainians. Blackmailed into staying silent, Jones risks his reputation by publishing the truth.

Holland’s most prolific works, which were nominated for Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, deal directly with Holocaust narratives, including Europa Europa (1990) and In Darkness (2011). But Mr. Jones is perhaps more in tune with 1985’s Angry Harvest in its attempt to showcase the competing and troubling abuses of power within social and political hierarchies of the period. Though her latest isn’t without some excessively pointed moments (such as Joseph Mawle as Orwell, filmed reading passages of his famous novel, or a group of children taunting Jones during his pariah status in Wales), it’s a world apart from 2017’s genre thriller Spoor, which may have won Holland the Alfred Bauer Award following its premiere at the Berlinale, but unfortunately suffered from pulpy, melodramatic antics.

With Jones, Holland recreates the secret decadence of Moscow’s hoi polloi, their silent complicity partially to blame for the slow death of the Soviet Union’s tyrannical empire. Nods to current world affairs between Russia and the U.S. are clear in the film’s initial dialogues comparing the despotism of Hitler and Stalin, and Holland reaches chilling heights with Jones slipping away into the nightmare of the Ukraine, a hellish winter war zone where cruelty and cannibalism are the only means for the resilient to stay alive.

A slick ensemble, first-time screenwriter Andrea Chalupa prizes ideas and historical flavors, and while the cast is efficient, none of the performers end up overshadowing the scenario, not even a dependable James Norton as the titular journo. Vanessa Kirby and a reptilian Peter Sarsgaard are both commendable accents in a fascinating recuperation which has troubling timely parallels to contemporary world politics.

Reviewed on February 10th at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival. Opening Night Film – Competition. 141 Mins. https://www.ioncinema.com/reviews/agnieszka-holland-mr-jones-review

INTERVIEWS

‘Mr. Jones’ Producer Discusses Background of Berlin Competition Film

By Will Tizard – 7th February 2019

Agnieszka Holland’s “Mr. Jones,” screening in the Berlinale main competition, recounts the story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who risked his life to document the atrocities of the Stalin regime from inside the Soviet Union in 1933, a time when most Western reporters were satisfied with superficial state accounts of happy Soviet workers. Jones exposed the truth about the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that left millions of Ukrainians dead. The film, produced by Stanislaw Dziedzic at Film Produkcja, Klaudia Smieja and Andrea Chalupa, who also wrote the script, stars James Norton, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard. It was shot in three countries on an indie budget, but conveys the richly textured atmosphere of pre-war Eastern European society. Dziedzic describes the three years of wrangling and collaboration behind the premiere.

What was the deciding factor for you in taking on this project? It was 15 July, 2015, when I received and read the script. I realize that “Mr. Jones” is a very difficult story to tell, but I always try to see things optimistically and I saw hope in this story. I asked Klaudia Smieja to read the script and she shared the same feelings. We decided to meet with the author of the script, Andrea Chalupa, who became our producing partner.

Does “Mr. Jones” represent a new level of challenge for a company like Film Produkcja? Yes, but I didn’t realize that until just recently when someone told me that this is the first English-language film produced on this scale by a Polish company and by predominantly Polish producers. When we started out on the project, we didn’t foresee what was to come. It was a challenge and a learning experience, all at the same time.

Andrea Chalupa has said the “Mr. Jones” is more relevant now than ever with its portrayal of the dangers of reporting truthfully about corrupt regimes. Definitely. If you look around at the political scene, how the world is manipulated when the media is controlled by politics and money. Eighty-five years on from the Holodomor, time has passed, but history repeats itself. We have to try to prevent this. I hope that with this film we will help.

Do you anticipate that the film will do as well or better internationally as in Poland? This is an English-language film with an English and American principal cast. Agnieszka is also very well-known, internationally. We have a story that works on many levels: a historical story, based on a real-life Welsh hero who discovers a Ukrainian tragedy. The film questions politics, journalistic integrity and the power of literature via George Orwell’s commentary, and his defining novel of the time, “Animal Farm.” It is a universal story and intelligent filmmaking. Audiences will learn what happened in the past and observe what is happening now. It’s a warning to us all not to repeat the same mistakes.

How did the resources for the project come together? The Polish Film Institute was one of the first to support the project, with more than 10% participation. They helped us to finalize the financing of the movie at the end as well. The biggest challenge I think was probably the financing. We managed to raise the money from a few different countries and via private equity. On the location side, we spent a lot of time researching and chose the best, most accessible places for our budget. Three different shooting countries wasn’t easy!

How was this international cast assembled for an independent project? Firstly we approached Agnieszka’s agent and asked her to read the script. Once she agreed to direct, things started to move forward. It wasn’t easy, especially when you are not recognized as a producer on an international level and don’t have an experienced international producer on board. Our casting agent from London worked with us very closely and with their connections, things started to move quickly. Dealing with Hollywood agents was another new challenge. When you make a local film, it is like working in your neighbourhood, you know almost everyone, but once you move outside then an unknown challenge awaits and you have to start from scratch. https://variety.com/2019/film/spotlight/mr-jones-producer-discusses- background-of-berlin-competition-film-1203131265/

Agnieszka Holland on her Berlinale competition title 'Mr. Jones' starring James Norton

By Louise Tutt – 11th February 2019

Agnieszka Holland’s Competition title Mr. Jones stars James Norton, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard. The director tells Screen why she believes the trio’s TV experience brought an invaluable energy to the film about the great Ukrainian famine.

Agnieszka Holland nearly gave up on Mr. Jones. The Polish filmmaker was a year into the project and she had finally found the right actor to play the real- life Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who exposed Stalin’s genocide-famine of the Ukrainian people in the early 1930s.

But the actor (she won’t say who) left when he got a “more interesting” offer. “We thought we were finished,” Holland admits. “We needed a ‘name’ for the finance and we needed quite an intelligent person. Then the agent of the guy who had left us, feeling some responsibility, started to make some movement around the project and suddenly we had a lot of interest. It was clear to me James Norton was the man.”

Mr. Jones is the first big film role for Norton, the UK star of BBC TV series Happy Valley and McMafia. “James went into deep research. He’s a very intellectual actor,” says Holland. “It was the same with Vanessa [Kirby] who is very political and intelligent and well-read.”

Kirby, whose credits include two seasons of Netflix’s The Crown as Princess Margaret and Paramount’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout, stars as a Moscow- based journalist who works with The New York Times and its Stalin-supporting bureau chief, played by Peter Sarsgaard.

Mr. Jones is based on true events and speculates whether Jones’ actions helped to inspire George Orwell to write Animal Farm. “They were of the same generation, interested in the same subjects, living in London at the same time, having the same literary agent and mixing in the same circles,” says Holland of Jones and Orwell.

The prolific Holland — whose In Darkness won an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film in 2012, and was last in Berlin with Spoor in 2017 — was sent the script by a first-time US-based writer Andrea Chalupa.

“Andrea had seen my films and my political statements and imagined I was the right person to direct it. I’m quite a popular film director in some circles in the US,” Holland says lightly.

“I receive quite a lot of scripts dealing with terrible chapters in history. Mostly I respect their importance but I’m not very interested. I find it depressing to re- enter this reality. And most of the scripts are very superficial. So when I started to read this I thought I would end up putting it down but I was intrigued. Not only by the story and the characters but by the concept to connect it to Orwell’s Animal Farm. I found it very powerful and moving.”

Holland teamed up with Polish producers Klaudia Smieja of Madants and Stanislaw Dziedzic of Film Produkcja and secured support from the Polish Film Institute. Filming took place in three locations in three different seasons in 2018: winter in Ukraine (working with local outfit Film.ua), spring in Poland to stand in for London and Moscow, and summer in Scotland in which Edinburgh doubled for Wales. Angus Lamont’s Crab Apple Films was the local co-producer. WestEnd Films has international rights to the project.

“We had very little time with Peter [Sarsgaard] who arrived [in Poland] at the last moment,” Holland explains. “But those three actors, Peter, James and Vanessa, have great experience in working in very ambitious TV series. They had this immediate alertness about them and they were very fast paced. That can sometimes be damaging if it becomes superficial but it gave them a quick energy, which I personally like.”

Indeed, Holland was one of the first European arthouse film directors to move fluidly between film and TV, working on the original raft of prestige dramas including HBO’s The Wire and Netflix’s House Of Cards.

Mr. Jones’ core Polish crew included cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk who had worked previously with Holland on her second-unit crew and whose credits include Claire Denis’ High Life.

“We didn’t want this to be a stiff period film,” says Holland. “We wanted it to have its own energy and with Tomasz, he’s a young guy and very open and creative. I’m not somebody who says, ‘Do it like that.’ It is a collaboration and I try to build the feeling of a creative community on set.”

The lightness of the shoot was in sharp contrast to the film’s dark subject matter and its echo of contemporary events. “The great famine forms the basis but this is also the story of corruption of media, the co-opting of the government and the indifference of people. If you have these three things together, they are all terrible. And we are very much in this situation right now.” https://www.screendaily.com/features/agnieszka-holland-on-her-berlinale- competition-title-mr-jones/5136874.article

Berlinale 2019 women directors: Meet Agnieszka Holland – “Mr. Jones”

By Laura Berger – 8th February 2019

Agnieszka Holland has made over 30 films, winning awards including the Golden Globe and Silver Bear, and has been nominated for a BAFTA and an Emmy. Her films “In Darkness,” “Europa Europa,” and “Bittere Ernte” (“Angry Harvest”) were all nominated for Academy Awards. “Mr. Jones” will premiere at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival on February 10.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words. AH: Based on true events, it is the story of a young and smart Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, who travels to Soviet Russia in the hope of interviewing Stalin. He feels something is wrong there and tries to figure out the problem. He succeeds in sneaking to the Ukraine and discovers massive, man-made famine, which is killing millions. He tried to alert the world but was discredited by a powerful New York Times correspondent and by Western politicians. It is a story about fake news, corruption of media, cowardice of politicians, the indifference of nations, and — ultimately — the courage of an individual.

W&H: What drew you to this story? AH: I wanted to give justice to one of the worst – and practically unknown – genocides. I felt that the story is incredibly relevant. The world we’re living in [is starting] to look like the worst periods in the 20th century. I loved the main character: his courage, honesty, and deep understanding of the duty of journalism.

W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater? AH: I want them to think — to feel, and to try to understand why this story is so important. But first I want them to open their hearts and minds.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film? AH: How to express the things you cannot express: the fear, the suffering, and the death of millions of innocents. The sequence of Gareth’s journey through empty villages in the Ukraine was very challenging. We wanted to find a very discreet, simple way to show this terrible reality. We wanted it to be very evocative and powerful by using the whispers, not the cries.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made. AH: I think my producers can explain it better than I can. We’ve been supported by public funds in Poland, Ukraine, and Scotland by different city agencies and post-production facilities. Private investors from Canada topped up the budget.

W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker? AH: It was a long time ago, in the mid ’60s. I was in high school and really inspired by the cinema of those times, which included several New Waves, and a lot of great filmmakers: Robert Bresson, Andrzej Wajda, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Andrei Tarkovsky, and many, many others. Cinema was innovative and exciting then. I wanted to tell the stories — to express my visual skills and to tell people what to do. Being a film director seemed like the best vocation.

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received? AH: The best: Be yourself and remember that the audience is a necessary part of your movie. The worst: Try to please.

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors? AH: Be yourself. Don’t pretend that you know something when you don’t. Remember your duties to your crew and actors. They need to trust you and be inspired by you.

W&H: Name your favourite woman-directed film and why. AH: Agnès Varda is just the best — she’s such a great filmmaker. I especially love “Happiness,” one of her early movies. It is very delicate and cruel at the same time.

W&H: It’s been a little over a year since the reckoning in Hollywood and the global film industry began. What differences have you noticed since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched? AH: More and more people understand how important and valuable women’s points of view are, and the right to tell our stories — and have them heard. It is only beginning, but I hope that we, women, the majority of humanity, will be not treated like the minority anymore. https://womenandhollywood.com/berlinale-2019-women-directors-meet- agnieszka-holland-mr-jones/

PRESS CONFERENCE COVERAGE

Agnieszka Holland on Berlin Title ‘Mr. Jones’: Democracy Needs a Free Press

By Christopher Vourlias – 10th February 2019

In Berlin with her latest film, Academy Award nominee Agnieszka Holland gave an impassioned defense of a free press and warned that societies must remain vigilant against growing threats to democracy around the world.

At a press conference Sunday to promote “Mr. Jones,” which world premieres Sunday in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, the Polish director said freedom was “overrated” when people “can choose the darkness instead of the light.”

“Freedom is very difficult,” she said. “It means making choices. It means also to be defeated. It means also to make the mistakes.”

“Mr. Jones” is based on the true story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who struggled to bring to light the story of the Ukrainian famine wrought by the brutal policies of Joseph Stalin. The film stars James Norton, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard.

Holland called it her “moral duty” to shine a spotlight on what she described as “one of the worst crimes of humanity in the 20th century,” saying she “felt like the ghosts of this crime are just calling for…some kind of justice.”

The director of such acclaimed films as the Nazi-era drama “Europa Europa” admitted that she’d grown reluctant to tell more stories about the atrocities of Europe’s recent past, saying: “It’s too painful, and it’s too costly.”

But with the script for “Mr. Jones,” written by Andrea Chalupa, she found a historical drama that nevertheless felt relevant to the current political moment, insisting: “I believe that we cannot have democracy without free media.” Norton said he was inspired by the life of Jones, who was murdered under suspicious circumstances on the eve of his 30th birthday, saying he “paid the biggest sacrifice” in his pursuit of the truth.

“Right now, there’s so much conversation about fake news and media and the world of journalism. More than ever, we need to protect journalists,” he said. “If this film can be a catalyst for that conversation, and hopefully earn the respect required for journalists, and maybe even inspire some young future Gareth Jones to go out there and find the truth, that would be a wonderful thing.” https://variety.com/2019/film/news/agnieszka-holland-on-berlin-title-mr-jones- democracy-needs-a-free-press-1203134919/

Berlin: Agnieszka Holland Says She Fears German Nostalgia for Adolf Hitler

By Etan Vlessing – 10th February 2019

The Polish director made the comments about the former German dictator while touting her Stalin-era drama 'Mr. Jones' at the Berlin Film Festival.

Oscar-nominated director Agnieszka Holland (In Darkness) on Sunday, after expressing puzzlement over Russian nostalgia for the Soviet past and Josef Stalin, added she feared Germany may similarly grow wistful about former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

"I'm afraid about if we come to the moment when the German nation will consider that Adolf Hitler was one of the greatest German leaders," Holland said during a politically charged press conference at the Berlin Film Festival.

The Polish director was in Berlin to talk about Mr. Jones, her drama about Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, whose Stalin-era truth-telling about the 1930s famine in the Ukraine is said to have inspired George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Animal Farm. As Holland discussed what she sees as the overlooked history of the Holodomor, or the Soviet-era famine in the Ukraine, as preventing peace today between Vladimir Putin's Russia and the Ukrainian people, her thoughts then turned to current Russian nostalgia for the Stalin era.

"It's tragic. It shows some enslavement of the mind and the soul," the Europa, Europa director said. Holland, recalling recent media reports she had come across, also pointed to "rich British people" who she claimed financed the Brexit campaign for Britain to leave the European Community, and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon having apparently been bankrolled by wealthy backers to encourage the European far right.

"The only thing we can do is have a free and courageous media," Holland insisted as she brought the conversation back to the subject of her film who, despite a backlash, insisted on revealing the truth about the 1930s Ukrainian famine.

James Norton, who plays Jones in the film, seconded Holland's support for a free media.

"Gareth was a good soul. In the beginning of his life, he knew what he wanted to achieve, and he paid a big price to achieve that," Norton recalled.

Mr. Jones co-star Peter Sarsgaard was as passionate as Norton and Holland in his support for journalists as truth-tellers. "They're the spearhead," Sarsgaard said at the Berlin presser. The Berlin Film Festival continues through Feb. 17. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/berlin-agnieszka-holland-says-she- fears-german-nostalgia-adolf-hitler-1184720

OFFICIAL PHOTOS

Germany – Berlinale Film Festival

By John MacDougall – 10th February 2019

https://www.gettyimages.ae/detail/news-photo/actor-peter-sarsgaard- producer-and-screenwriter-andrea-news-photo/1097104452 https://www.gettyimages.ae/detail/news-photo/stanis%C5%82aw-dziedzic- peter-sarsgaard-andrea-chalupa-james-news-photo/1128699486 https://www.gettyimages.ae/detail/news-photo/agnieszka-holland-and-james- norton-pose-at-the-mr-jones-news-photo/1128703865

Mr. Jones photocall, Berlin International Film Festival

By Felipe Trueba – 10th February 2019

https://www.shutterstock.com/editorial/entertainment/'mr.-jones'- photocall%2C-berlin-international-film-festival-2019-02-10

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