L'ombre de Staline

This story is very engaging. The scenes of famine do etch onto the viewers' brains. I feel very sad for the fate of a righteous whistleblower.

Saw this at Berlinale and was impressed. Agnieszka Holland created a strong historical drama, employing artistical license here an there. But the main points (different from what user-973-741969 claims in his review) are true. Blasphemy it is only to those who still worship Stalin. The movie follows political advisor/journalist Gareth Jones. After losing his job with the british foreign secretary in London he tries to reeignite his career through an interview with Stalin. And why not since he already interviewed Hitler and Goebbels (where the movie lazily unterplays his admiration for the pre-war-Nazis. Sadly Jones didn´t live to see their downfall and could never reevaluate his naivety). In Moscow, Jones contacts NYT-Reporter Duranty, who is well connected an a staunch supporter of Stalin. Jones doesnt make it to the Soviet Leader but can board a train south to inspect the industrialisation of the Soviet Union. But he escapes the agents that accompany him and travels on his own through Ukraine to witness the Holodomor, a famine that cost millions of lives as a result of Stalins communist reshaping of agriculture in 1933 and was until then mostly unheard of outside of the USSR - and even in the SU. Back in the west Jones has a hard time to prove his allegations. His camera was taken, Duranty, who has a much better reputation calls him a liar and even the british government doesn´t want to risk the lucrative economic relations with the USSR. Holland focuses only partly on the famine and more on the role of stalinist propaganda and the gullability of western media and politics, that swept this catastrophe under the rug for decades. It´s a thrilling movie that doesn´t have the budget to show millions of dead and instead focuses on intimate an gruesome details. The luxury of the elites (western & russian) in Moscow are in stark contrast to the suffering of the peasants. "Mr Jones" brings us to the beginning of worldwide propaganda and fake news strategies where a journalists live is cheap and the people are just pawns in hands of big powers.

Sometimes cinema can bring history alive and little known facts and personalities can be highlighted or rediscovered, and so it is here. Gareth Jones was a diplomat and journalist who wrote about the terrible famine in the Ukraine during the early 1930s which the Soviet's, and many others, we're trying to hide at the time. It's a sober but fascinating insight into a almost forgotten episode, and is very skilfully done with a fine central performance by Edward Norton as Jones and well staged scenes of his tense visits to the USSR and his gradual discovery of the regimes corruption and lies. Tightly scripted and directed, this is one worth discovering.

All the terror, horror and atrocities of the war and its effects on Ukraine, the Holodomor (Famine of Terror or the Great Famine), including empty villages, starving people, cannibalism and the forced harvest of grain, a beautiful but belated homage to the Lord Gareth Jones (journalist), very sad, appropriate for the current war Russia x Ukraine, a real story, Portraits of War, told simply and efficiently, as he wanted and reports at the beginning of the film...

I'm very glad I stuck this one out.

It is a little slow at the beginning, but the moral clarity of this film really stands out. This is a true story that needs to be heard. It's a story of an undercover freelance journalist who was a great hero, though many people don't know his name. It's a story of how the New York Times and the other intellectual elites in the 1930s defended one of the most evil regimes in history. It's a story of the naivety of so many well-meaning people. It's a story of the unspeakable evil of communism. These are stories you won't usually hear from Hollywood, but someone had the balls to make this.

The only negatives of this film are some obvious lacking in production value at times. But this is made up by surprisingly terrific acting and some extraordinarily effective scenes portraying the great evils of communism.