Written by Andrea Chalupa
Directed by Agnieszka Holland
Starring James Norton, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard
Running time: 2 hours and 21 minutes

by Fiona Underhill

The pre-war period of the 1930s is one of the most fascinating of the twentieth century and, in terms of film, has perhaps most famously been explored through Hitchcock’s espionage thrillers eg. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), The Secret Agent (1936) and Sabotage (1937). After WWI, nationalism and fascism rose in Germany, Spain and Italy in the 20s and 30s, at roughly the same time as the rise of communism in Soviet Russia, meaning that, like the Cold War period that followed WWII, it was an era of distrust and uncertainty. While news of the Holocaust emerged after WWII, other horrors which occurred outside of ‘war’ time are less well known. Such is the case with the Holodomor – a Ukrainian famine that occurred in 1932-1933 and was man-made (deliberately inflicted by Soviet Russia), in which the death toll is estimated to be between 3 and 7.5 million.