Death in Ukraine: Was ‘Mr. Jones’ a Film or a Prophesy?

obywatel_jones_13_fot._robert_palka.jpg, default, Still from Agnieszka Holland's 'Mr. Jones' picturing James Norton, photo: Robert Pałka/Film Produkcja/Kino Świat

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‘Mr. Jones’, a 2019 period film directed by Agnieszka Holland about a journalist reporting on Holodomor – the Stalin-made famine in 1930s Ukraine – is proving to be more relevant than ever as it regains popularity too.

Turning a blind eye

In 1933, ‘Death in Ukraine’ was a headline one could read in newspapers that decided to run articles written by the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones. His reporting was a result of his risqué and ultimately lethal investigation conducted in the Soviet Union. He was also the first to report on the existence of Holodomor, Stalin’s famine genocide, to the West. Publishing these revelations was a bold move from the papers’ owners – most notably William Randolph Hearst – since the most popular narrative at that time was to praise Stalin and his ‘economic miracle’. Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty was the loudest voice of the cheering crowd, and neither hunger nor starvation were mentioned in his articles, just a ‘food shortage’, which Duranty deemed a consequential element of building a new country.

The distribution of the dailies is shown in one of the last scenes of Agnieszka Holland’s Mr. Jones. The film – written by a debutante, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and a scholar of Ukrainian descent – was co-produced by Poland, Ukraine as well as the United Kingdom and was released in 2019.

As Holland points out in her film, the Western world chose to ignore the fact that building a communist utopia cost more than a food shortage – the price was being paid with the lives of millions of Ukrainians. Also, British politicians refused to acknowledge Stalin’s crime for many reasons, mainly as to avoid another great war in Europe. In addition, they held a firm belief that the only threat to world peace was Adolf Hitler. On the other hand, American politicians had their own reasons for turning a blind eye to Stalin’s atrocities: in 1933, the USSR was yet to be officially recognized by the United States and deals between the two economies were already underway. This too is depicted in Holland’s film.

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Still from Agnieszka Holland's 'Mr. Jones' picturing James Norton, photo: Robert Pałka/Film Produkcja/Kino Świat

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What Mr. Jones doesn’t mention, and what should be added, is the deeply rooted hatred for Ukraine that Stalin cultivated for years. Along with taking away grains, livestock and crops, he wanted to eradicate Ukrainian culture, customs and language. As Serhii Plokhii, professor of Ukrainian History and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, points out in his article about Mr. Jones, Stalin was closing Ukrainian schools, newspapers and cultural institutions as early as in 1932. The parallel between this and the recent, disgraceful February 2022 speech by Putin about how Ukraine is, and has always been, an integral part of Russia – is nauseating.

A warning

Reading the ‘Death in Ukraine’ headlines and seeing Mr. Jones today, weeks after the Russian invasion in Ukraine, feels ominous, to say the least. Holland’s film proves to be prophetic in retrospect. Yet, at the time of its original release, which was the Berlin Film Festival 2019, the reception of Mr. Jones was lukewarm at best. The critics were impressed with some parts of the film – mainly with the dreamlike sequence of Gareth Jones’ journey through the famished Ukrainian countryside – while they found the other scenes longish and considered them a slightly stiff lesson in history. There is a Polish expression that says ‘it’s difficult to be a prophet in your own country’, and for being an international helmer, which Agnieszka Holland is, it has been proven to be true on more than just a local level. Her film is not an unsubstantiated claim: Holland knows very well what she is talking about when she examines 20th century regimes. She grew up under the communist regime in Poland and was persecuted by another – communist Czechoslovakia. She dedicated a big part of her professional career to portray, analyse and warn of authoritarian powers, to name a few: Europa, Europa, In Darkness or Charlatan.

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Still from Agnieszka Holland's 'Mr. Jones' picturing James Norton, photo: Robert Pałka/Film Produkcja/Kino Świat

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While promoting Mr. Jones in Berlin three years ago, Holland already warned that historical events left untold will come back to haunt Europe. As she told Cineuropa in an interview:

I’d never been asked to direct a film about Holodomor. For a long time, I’d been thinking and telling people that many of the crimes condoned by the communist regime are still not talked about. There is no global awareness surrounding them, whereas the Holocaust, for example, is a known part of human history. […] I think the fact that these atrocities are shrouded in silence is one of the reasons for the moral chaos we can feel in Europe today.

She also noted that despite being responsible for killing over 20 million of his own people, Stalin is still considered by Russians as being one of the greatest leaders in history. ‘To understand how monstrous that is, and the influence it must have on the politics in Russia, we have to imagine what would happen if the Germans picked Hitler!’ Holland added. But Mr. Jones is not solely a warning, or a history lesson, as some of the early reviews suggested. It is first and foremost a thriller told from the perspective of an idealist who is faced with the choice to either ignore the evils he witnesses with his own eyes or risk everything, including his own life, to report it. In today’s world, the price one must pay for speaking up is hardly that high, but everything ultimately comes down to the choice that Jones made – one either calls out the evil or ignores it.

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Still from Agnieszka Holland's 'Mr. Jones' picturing James Norton, photo: Robert Pałka/Film Produkcja/Kino Świat

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Inconvenient news

The film introduces Gareth Jones while he is in his late 20s, serving as foreign advisor to David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister. The young Welshmen made a name for himself interviewing Adolf Hitler, and in the film’s opening sequence, Jones is warning British high-level politicians of Hitler’s ravenous appetite for conquering Europe. The room doesn’t take Jones seriously, however, shaking their heads in disbelief while smoking cigars. The news that this young man is bringing is equally as inconvenient as is his zealous attitude – and his hunger for getting to the bottom of things.

Jones announces that he wants to go to the USSR, to examine and possibly interview another world leader – Stalin. Initially, he too believed the Soviet propaganda, but when the facts stopped seeming plausible, he decided to dig deeper, and so he does – even after he is let go by Lloyd George. Gareth Jones travels to Moscow as a stringer and meets his fellow journalists there. He sees how they support the official narrative about the USSR, and how Walter Duranty is compromising his journalistic ethos to gain favours with Moscow and uphold his status as the most important Western correspondent in the Soviet Union. Wanting to see something other than what the officials are willing to show him, Gareth Jones jumps off a train from Moscow and takes another one going to the countryside. He travels around frozen villages, to the Ukrainian heart of darkness, where he witnesses the biggest atrocities he has ever seen, cannibalism included. After he miraculously survives and manages to escape the USSR, he tries to tell the world what he had just seen. The problem is that the world is not that willing to listen…

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Still from Agnieszka Holland's 'Mr. Jones' picturing James Norton, photo: Robert Pałka/Film Produkcja/Kino Świat

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Today, when all eyes are on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and both traditional and social media provide live coverage from surrounding cities, there is no need to convince anyone about the gravity of the situation. And instead of ‘Death in Ukraine’, most social media posts say ‘Glory to Ukraine’. Still, a lot of fake news is being spread by the Kremlin’s loyal journalists, this also includes propaganda – the Walter Durantys of this world are alive and well. Nevertheless, this journalist cannot help but think for how long European leaders held a similar attitude towards Putin that their predecessors had towards Stalin.

Falling on deaf ears

Few paid attention to what Gareth Jones was saying, and not many wanted to listen to Agnieszka Holland’s ‘reporting’ too. Mr. Jones was sold to many international markets and earned 2.8 million dollars worldwide, which was below expectations. In Poland, it landed in the 20th spot at the box office in November 2019, grossing 1.2 million złoty (approx. $300,000). One of Agnieszka Holland’s previous films – the Oscar nominated WWII film In Darkness – was over 3 times more successful, both on the local and international market. Karolina Pasternak, who just published a brilliant biography of Agnieszka Holland, notes that the film was significantly more popular in France, where it had a very telling title – Ombre de Stalin (The Shadow of Stalin).

Pasternak tells Culture.pl:

At that time in Poland there was not a lot of interest in historical parabolas and cautionary tales from the past. Mr. Jones is not a typical ‘festival film’, it is a genre story; it has action and a strong protagonist. And despite all of that, it didn’t appeal to a wider audience. […] I think that powerful posters, allusions to Stalin and Orwell’s Animal Farm, as well as to the contemporary world, made people want to push that aside, turn a blind eye on it. They preferred to believe that it’s the past and that’s where it belongs. And now they say in disbelief, that history repeats itself and that Putler [Putin + Hitler] is back.

She adds that as of March 2022, additional screenings of Mr. Jones are being organised in the UK and in the Czech Republic.

Look at bookstores: the bestselling books are about Putin, WWII and potential WWIII. Also, many people re-read George Orwell’s Animal Farm that bookends, so to speak, Agnieszka Holland’s film. The novel is a poignant metaphor of the USSR, with animal characters inspired by Stalin and his inner circle and contains the famous line: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’.

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Still from Agnieszka Holland's 'Mr. Jones' picturing James Norton, photo: Robert Pałka/Film Produkcja/Kino Świat

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Animal Farm was written during WWII and got published – not without difficulty – in 1945. Worth mentioning is that the first language the book was translated into was Ukrainian. It was done by Ihor Shevchenko, who grew up in interwar Warsaw and wrote for Polish papers published abroad. Orwell’s book was distributed among Ukrainians stationed in displaced persons (DP) camps around Europe. The circulation was as high as 5000, and Orwell wrote a letter to Ukrainian refugees that served as an introduction to his book – it was the only introduction he had ever written. Incidentally, DP camps are where parents of Mr. Jones screenwriter, Andrea Chalupa, were born. She added her grandparents' account of the Holodomor, the death in Ukraine, to the story about the man who uncovered it to the world.

_{Written by Ola Salwa, March 2022
Sources: ukrweekly.com; ukrainianstitute.org.uk; cineuropa.org}

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