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 Holland, who during a decades-long career has made films about
the Nazi Holocaust and Communist tyranny in eastern Europe,
pointed to Britain's vote to leave the European Union as a sign
lessons from the past were being forgotten.
"I think that the experience of World War Two, the Holocaust,
gave to Europe especially some kind of vaccination out of fear
that things like that can happen again, but it evaporated in the
last few years," she told reporters at the Berlin Film Festival
before her film was presented on Sunday.
The film, one of 17 competing for the festival's Golden Bear
award, tells the story of Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who
escaped the gilded cage of 1930s Moscow to discover that the
facade of a thriving Soviet economy rested on Ukrainian corpses.
The famine of 1932 and 1933, when leader Josef Stalin killed
millions by diverting train-loads of wheat to prop up the
Russian heartlands, still burdens ties between Russia and
Ukraine, which is fighting a war against Moscow-backed
separatists in its east.
Holland said the story of Jones, who risked his life to tell the
world of peasants eating tree bark and orphaned children eating
their own siblings in Ukrainian villages, was especially
important in an age of "fake news".
Written by Andrea Chalupa, a New Yorker of Ukrainian descent,
the film contrasts Jones's heroism with his more successful
rival Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard), whose initial
compromises become lies as the New York Times correspondent
seeks to preserve his status as doyen of Moscow society.
"The story I was telling myself was I have access," said U.S.
actor Sarsgaard. "I was the gatekeeper for the Western world and
if I went away there'd be no access. I betray myself and my
profession by degrees."
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Duranty's drugs-, drink- and sex-fueled orgies, clearing houses
for journalists seeking gossip, are shot in rich colors that
contrast with the unsaturated whiteness of wintry Ukraine.
In one scene, starving Ukrainians look on ravenously as Norton
eats an orange, its peel the one dab of color in the frame.
Holland said she hoped the film would spark a reevaluation of
the importance of journalism and its ability to tell the truth,
blaming Britain's Brexit vote on "essential lies" and
"manipulation" by wealthy financial backers.
Now, she said she was worried about the efforts of Steve Bannon,
former adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, to mobilize
politically in Europe. "He is financed by the richest
industrialists," she said. "The only tool we have is free,
courageous media."
But the film's immediate task was to remind the world about the
least known of the massacres that disfigure Europe's 20th
century, said British actor James Norton, who plays Jones.
"There are ghosts calling for this spotlight to be shone," he
said. In 1935, Jones, not yet 30, was murdered by Soviet agents
while reporting from Mongolia.
(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
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