Trae Crowder and Andrea Chalupa 524

I was born and raised in Davis, California, and currently live in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from the University of California, at Davis with High Honors in History, with a focus on Soviet History, I studied Ukrainian at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the International School of Ukrainian Studies in L’viv, Ukraine. As a journalist, I cut my teeth in the newsrooms of Conde Nast Portfolio and AOL Money & Finance, and have written articles and columns for The Daily Beast, Forbes, TIME, and The Atlantic. Since 2004, while finishing my History thesis on the role of religion in Ukraine’s independence movement at the fall of the Soviet Union, I began dreaming up a screenplay that would take me fifteen years to research, write, and produce. That screenplay became MR. JONES, directed by three-time Academy Award-nominee Agnieszka Holland and starring James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, Peter Sarsgaard, and Joseph Mawle as George Orwell. Much of the research for the film was compiled into my book Orwell and The Refugees: The Untold Story of Animal Farm, which has been taught in classrooms in Canada and Ukraine through the genocide education program Orwell Art.

When I was growing up in Northern California, my grandfather Olexji was the world to me. Born in Donbas, a region in eastern Ukraine currently being invaded by Russia, my grandfather witnessed the Russian Revolution fought on his family farm as a small boy; survived the Holodomor, Stalin’s genocide famine that killed an estimated 4 to 7 million people; and as a young father was arrested and tortured by the Soviet secret police during Stalin’s purges. Shortly before he passed away at the age of 83, my grandfather wrote down his life story, showing the events Orwell allegorized in Animal Farm through the eyes of a survivor.

It was for my grandfather and the countless others who suffered under the Soviet regime that I wrote and produced MR. JONES. The idea first came to me in my final year of university and followed me to Ukraine after college and to a road trip through Wales shortly before my wedding, and many research trips for several years after. I wanted to tell a story that would honor the millions of victims of Stalin, who has been resurrected under Putinism as a great hero, and expose how Kremlin propaganda works - sometimes with the help of corrupt Western journalists and political leaders. The history of Stalin’s genocide is told through this short documentary I was asked to write, director, and prod...