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Front Row: Agnieszka Holland on Mr Jones, Risk Season - Failure, Timur Vermes

31/01/2020

Agnieszka Holland on Mr Jones, Risk Season - Failure, Timur Vermes

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Agnieszka Holland on Mr Jones, Risk Season - Failure, Timur Vermes

Director Agnieszka Holland on her film Mr Jones starring James Norton.

Agnieszka Holland on film Mr Jones about the journalist who exposed Stalin's genocidal famine.  German novelist Timur Vermes.  And what happens when art fails?

Polish director Agnieszka Holland, best-known for her Oscar nominated feature films about the Holocaust, discusses her new film Mr Jones, starring James Norton as the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones.  Jones exposed the truth about Stalin’s genocidal famine which killed millions in Ukraine in the early 1930s and his reporting of the story inspired George Orwell’s Animal Farm.  

Continuing Front Row’s risk season, theatre critic Michael Billington talks about when risks fail to pay off. Failure in the arts can be a taboo subject and Doctor Leila Jancovich from Leeds University has been exploring histories of failure and why it seems the arts find it difficult to learn from their mistakes. 

Timur Vermes' first novel Look Who's Back was a satire imagining the return of Hitler in the present day and sold over 3 million copies.  The German novelist's new book, The Hungry and the Fat, translated by Jamie Bulloch, considers what would happen if thousands of refugees walked to the German border.

Presenter:  Tom Shakespeare
Producer:  Sarah Johnson

Main image: James Norton in Mr Jones
Photo credit: Signature Entertainment

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