Boulder International Film Festival: Mr. Jones

Based on a true story, Agnieszka Holland’s thriller, set on the eve of world WWII, sees Hitler’s rise to power and Stalin’s Soviet propaganda machine pushing their “utopia” to the Western world. Meanwhile, an ambitious young journalist, Gareth Jones (James Norton), travels to Moscow to uncover the truth behind the propaganda. After receiving a mysterious telephone tip, Jones slips out of Moscow on a train to Kiev. From the moment he steps off the train, he sees corpses lying in the snow. He has stepped into the vast living horror of what Ukrainians still call the Holodomor, “murder by starvation.” George Orwell was so inspired by Jones’ work that he wrote Animal Farm and named the proprietor “Mr. Jones.”​​

Starring James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, Peter Sarsgaard