SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 3.14.2026
The Academy Awards are upon us and serious movies rarely receive the Red Carpet treatment.
Tonight I watched transfixed the sobering and seriously motivating story ‘Mr. Jones ‘. Gareth Jones, a British journalist, who traveled to Soviet Russia in 1933 and exposed the terror of Stalin’s starvation campaign against his own people. Millions perished while the world remained ignorant the genocide until William Randolph Hearst published Gareth Jones harrowing tale.
Mr. Jones met a cruel fate. He was kidnapped and assassinated by Soviet agents in Mongolia one day before his 30th birthday in 1935. Gareth Jones (journalist) – Wikipedia
Mr. Jones (2019 film) – Wikipedia
The Holodomor,[a] also known as the Ukrainian famine,[8][9][b] was a massive man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.
The film, directed by Agnieszka Holland, is meticulous. Particularly the cinemaphotography as it alternates between black/white and color.
The entire ensemble cast is stellar.
One story lines involves George Orwell and his novel ‘Animal Farm’. Apparently, the inspiration for the story was based on the ‘Holodomor’.
A second story line involves New York Times reporter Walter Duranty who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. It turns out that Duranty was well aware of Stalin’s atrocities against his own people. Yet continued to knowingly spin the fiction there was no famine. Even when the reality was known his Pulitzer was never revoked. Walter Duranty – Wikipedia https://share.google/MdriSCGn68mf9qEoU
Top photo: James Norton portrayed British journalist Gareth Jones
Lee's Perspective 