Mr. Jones

The movie tells a little-known story. In 1933, Gareth Jones, an ambitious young Welsh journalist, traveled to the Soviet Union and discovered the appalling reality behind the myth of communist utopia. What begins as a routine journalistic investigation soon turns into a life-or-death quest to uncover the truth behind a government cover-up of Ukraine's famine. His efforts were thwarted not only by Soviet censors but also by Western journalists who were favorable to Stalin's regime, most notably Walter Duranty, then the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times. In real life, Jones was the first journalist to cover the Soviet Union's 1932-1933 Holodomor in Western media. But since many intellectuals were sympathetic to the Soviet regime, his reports were not well received. Duranty, who concealed the facts of the Holodomor at the time, also attracted criticism later. The Pulitzer Prize he won for his continued reporting on the Soviet Union was also described by the New York Times as an award for "Guilty With an Explanation" (Guilty With an Explanation).