Mr. Jones (Mr Jones in the United Kingdom; Polish: Obywatel Jones, lit. 'Citizen Jones'; Ukrainian: «Ціна правди», romanized: Tsina pravdy, lit. 'The Price of Truth') is a 2019 biographical thriller film written and co-produced by Andrea Chalupa and directed by Agnieszka Holland. It is based on the story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who uncovers the truth of the devastating famine (Holodomor) in which millions died in the Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union.
Critical reviews were largely positive, but there were objections to some historical inaccuracies. The film was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival.
Contents
Plot
In 1933, Gareth Jones is an ambitious young journalist, who has gained some renown for his interview with Adolf Hitler. The son of an English teacher in the Welsh colony of Hughesovka in Soviet Ukraine, Jones is troubled by the question of how Stalin's Soviet Union can be having a spending spree, as the numbers do not add up. Jones works as a political advisor to David Lloyd George, the former British prime minister, but with funding limited owing to the economic difficulties, and after failing to make his case in a critical meeting, he is made redundant.
Trading on his connections in Britain and in Russia, Jones manages to obtain a Russian visa with the intention of setting up an interview with Stalin. Upon arrival in Moscow, he meets Eugene Lyons, a Russian-American journalist, who is with a party of British engineers from Metropolitan-Vickers; they take him to a party at the home of Walter Duranty and give him cryptic hints that the Soviets are not as enlightened as they make out, and that Stalin's ability to pay for British engineers or new factories may not rest on the famed efficiency of the Ukrainian farms as they have claimed. He is also informed that journalists are forbidden to venture outside of Moscow. Through a chance meeting with fellow British journalist Ada Brooks—who is under close observation by the OGPU, the Soviet secret police—he learns that his contact in Moscow was murdered by the authorities while investigating the supposed Ukrainian agricultural revolution. Armed with this information, Jones alters his documents to make him appear to be still employed by Lloyd George and obtains an invitation to Ukraine by the Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov.
