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

Published: Jan. 31, 2020, 7:57 p.m.

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\u2019s genocidal famine which killed millions in Ukraine in the early 1930s and his reporting of the story inspired George Orwell\u2019s Animal Farm.

Continuing Front Row\u2019s 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\nProducer: Sarah Johnson

Main image: James Norton in Mr Jones\nPhoto credit: Signature Entertainment