“Mr. Jones” tells the story of the man who exposed the Ukrainian famine

By J.T-J. | BERLIN

WALKING THROUGH rural Ukraine in 1932, having eluded his Communist Party chaperone, Gareth Jones witnessed disturbing deprivation. People were starving, fighting each other tooth and nail for a single loaf of bread. Bodies lay in the street until they were piled up and carted away on wagons. While its own citizens suffered, the Soviet Union was continuing to export grain, projecting an image of prosperity to the West. Recent estimates have suggested that around 4m people perished in 1932 and 1933, around 13% of the Ukrainian population, in what is known today as the Holodomor (“killing by hunger”). At the time, though, few believed Jones’s reports; many politicians, diplomats and journalists tried to discredit him.

In “Mr. Jones”, a feature film which premiered at the Berlinale, the journalist’s search for the truth makes for stylish and compelling historical drama. It opens with Jones (played with sincerity and conviction by James Norton) presciently explaining the danger of Germany’s National Socialist party to Lloyd George, his boss at the Foreign Office, and his colleagues. They scoff at this bold young man. Before he can argue that the economic forecasts released by the Soviet Union are also a cause for concern, he is made redundant as a result of budget cuts.