Mr. Jones (2019)
Director: Agnieszka Holland Run Time: 119 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2019
Starring: James Norton, Joseph Mawle, Kenneth Cranham, Peter Sarsgaard, Vanessa Kirby
Country: Poland, United Kingdom, Ukraine
Language: English, Ukrainian, Russian, Welsh
Presented with the Ukrainian Culture Association of Ohio (UCAO). Introduction by Marta Mudri, Advisor and former Board Member of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives, Cleveland, Ohio. A short discussion and question/answer period will follow the presentation. Ticket proceeds benefit UCAO.
About the film:
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 (Norton) travels to Moscow to uncover the truth behind the propaganda, but then gets a tip that could expose an international conspiracy, one that could cost him and his informant their lives. Jones goes on a life-or-death journey to uncover the truth behind the façade that would later inspire George Orwell’s seminal book “Animal Farm”.
Mr. Jones, a feature film written by Andrea Chalupa and directed by the Academy Award-nominated director and screenwriter Agnieszka Holland, is a joint Polish, Ukrainian and British production that was premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019 and released in the United States in April of this year. Its Ukrainian title translates to The Price of Truth, and at its center is one man’s struggle to get to the truth about Joseph Stalin’s famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933, which the regime was hiding from the outside world on the eve of the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States.
About the filmmaker:
Agnieszka Holland is a film director and scriptwriter, born in Warsaw in 1948 and best known for her political contributions to Polish cinema. She studied filmmaking in Prague during the late 1960s. After co-directing her first feature, the 1977 film Screen Tests, she began a fruitful relationship with famed Polish director Andrzej Wajda, writing the screenplay for 1979’s Without Anesthesia. She gained notoriety as part of the Polish New Wave. Her features include three films that earned Academy Award nominations—Angry Harvest in 1985, Europa, Europa in 1990, and the Holocaust drama In Darkness in 2012—and the acclaimed 1993 feature The Secret Garden. More recently, her 2017 film Spoor and 2019 film Mr. Jones premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 2020, she was elected President of the European Film Academy.
See our upcoming films