According to Variety, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa) has recruited McMafia star James Norton and The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby for the politically-charged drama Gareth Jones.
Based on real events, the film takes place in the early 1930s and will see Norton as a Welsh journalist who visits Moscow hoping to interview Joseph Stalin. There he meets New York Times reporter Ada Brooks (Kirby), who clues him into Soviet government oppression – a story he then fights to report, as well as sharing with a young George Orwell, influencing the author’s classic novel Animal Farm.
“The script joins, in a very artistic and original way, a few issues from the 20th century which seem particularly valid today,” said Holland. “George Orwell’s famous novel, Animal Farm, links everything together: It reveals the mechanisms of totalitarian falsehood, and the terror that can be fought only by resistance to deception and violence. Nobody wanted to shed light on Stalin’s atrocities, which Gareth exposed. Today, we don’t lack corruptible conformists and egoists; we lack Orwells and Joneses. That is why we should bring them back to life.”
Gareth Jones was written by Andrea Serdaru-Barbul, who also produces, and filming is set to get underway this month.
