Polish director Agnieszka Holland has premiered a film about the cover-up of Stalin's mass famine in Ukraine with the complicity of the West, arguing this early example of "fake news" was still toxic today.
Holland's "Mr Jones", premiered Sunday at the Berlin film festival, stars James Norton as crusading Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who risked his life to expose the atrocity.
Peter Sarsgaard ("The Looming Tower") appears as the New York Times's corrupt Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty who won a Pulitzer prize for a series of articles denying the man-made famine was taking place.
Holland said she was drawn to the screenplay written by Andrea Chalupa because the mass deaths were part of a dark, still little-known chapter of European history.
"I felt like the ghosts of this crime are just calling for... some kind of spotlight, for some kind of justice. So I felt a moral duty when I read it," said Holland, who is best known for directing "Europa Europa", "The Secret Garden" and episodes of "The Wire".
She said the story about the 1932-33 Soviet-era famine, which many now regard as a genocide ordered by then leader Joseph Stalin, offered timely lessons about how societies can destroy themselves from within.
"The more we were advancing with this film, unfortunately, more and more these questions became relevant and urgent. Because I believe we cannot have democracy without free media," she said.
"This triad which we try to show -- the cowardice of the politicians, the corruption of media and the indifference of general public or societies -- it is something which opens up the door for the disasters... of the 20th century."
"The people realised that they'd be maybe not happy, not rich under Stalin, not free for sure, but somehow united in some kind of... safeness and they have nostalgia for that. It is a big lesson for humanity."