New Delhi: Indeed, history is written by the victor but its first inconvenient draft is written by journalists, men and women often labelled as liars, insane and anti-national by authoritarian regimes and their toadies. Despite that, you won’t find them screaming on TV screens. You’ll find them repeating the truth, calmly, with facts.
The acclaimed, 71-year-old Polish writer-director Agnieszka Holland’s English language feature film Mr Jones tells the story of two foreign journalists in Stalin’s Russia — Gareth Jones (James Norton), a freelance Welsh journalist, and Pulitzer award-winning reporter Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard), who was the New York Times’ bureau chief in Moscow.
The film is set in 1993, during what has since come to be known as the Holodomor (to kill by starvation), or the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine.
Jones arrives in a Moscow that is…
