Dodging bullets to shoot the truth

James Jones remembers the moment when he was shot at for the first time. It happened earlier this year when the British documentary-maker was in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv working on a film about the conflict in the country. He had been walking with the local mayor near a building inside which Right Sector, Ukraine’s controversial ultra-nationalist group, had taken hostages.

“The mayor said I am going to go in there to negotiate their release. You stay here, I am going in,” recalls Jones. “And then, as he is turning around, I am right by filming, and they start shooting out of the window because we were part of a little crowd and they were worried that we might be people who were going to attack them. They started shooting out of the window. So that was the first time I have kind of been shot at.”

A month later, towards the end of April, the mayor, Hennadiy Kernes, would be shot at again. This time he wasn’t so lucky in dodging the bullet, which hit him in the back and badly wounded him. “Now he is in a wheelchair but he is alive,” Jones says.

Jones’s documentary about the conflict, “The Battle for Ukraine”, was released in May by the American broadcaster PBS. It is the latest among a number of internationally themed films produced by the talented young documentary-maker who has been nominated for several prestigious prizes. His documentaries have covered stories from countries as diverse as North Korea, Nigeria, Russia, Syria, China, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

I went to interview Jones about his work one afternoon at the BAFTA club house in Piccadilly Circus, London. Sitting in a corner of a long rectangle-shaped table, in a busy room filled with lots of film types, he began to tell me how his career began. “My parents both kind of wish I had gone and worked in a bank,” says Jones, who grew up in London and studied Russian at Oxford University. “Obviously the Russian economy is a big player in the world. It is potentially quite a lucrative market. So I think my parents were a bit disappointed when I went into something so unpredictable, not particularly well paid, and all the rest of it.”

After he finished university, Jones managed to get a job as a translator for a series about Russian oligarchs at the BBC. “I immediately fell in love with it,” he says.

For a long time he freelanced, getting little bits of work. Then he managed to get a job at the BBC and stayed there for couple of years.“Just work my way up and learn how to film there, learn how the world works, and once you have got more credits under your belt, you know more people. So then I was able to go freelance.”

The first film Jones directed was released in 2011 on Channel 4’s Unreported World. It was called “Sex, Lies and Black Magic”. It was about human traffickers using black magic to trap Nigerian women into a life of prostitution in Europe. “That is the film I got most abuse for of anything I have ever worked for,” Jones tells me.

The reason for the criticism was one of the women featured in the film, Vivian, a 23-year-old Nigerian girl who goes through a Juju ceremony and gives an oath to her traffickers as she heads to Europe. “We filmed her going through this process of being trafficked by her boyfriend, going through the rituals and at the end she leaves, she travels off to Italy. And so many people wrote to us and said ‘how could you let her go?’ ‘Why didn’t you stop her?’

Jones insists he told her how awful it would be, being forced to live as a sex worker and describing the ordeal of standing outside in the middle of the night freezing. “She just didn’t believe us. And we couldn’t physically stop her. If we told the police they wouldn’t have been able to stop her because they can’t prove what is going on. You are in a difficult position.”

Particularly disturbing was Vivian’s boyfriend who openly admitted on camera he was doing it for money. “He was awful, I know, but the thing is, in that village, in that area, it is so normal. You know it is not a shameful thing. It seemed quite prestigious to go to Europe and earn money. They just don’t know how it is a grim reality.”

Jones’s other works include a recent film exposing the cracks in North Korea’s information barrier, another about the scale of suicide among British soldiers and veterans, and a film about rebels in Syria confronting the more extreme ISIS militant group.

In the case of the latter, Syria was too dangerous for Jones to travel to — so a Syrian reporter, Mohammad Ali, travelled there. “They [Syrian rebels] were losing to ISIS and [President] Assad was in one way quite happy they were losing to ISIS. Because ISIS is this kind of villain that Assad can use to say to the world ‘look I told you so, that these are Islamic extremists, and I am protecting Syrians from terrorists just like you are protecting British people from terrorists’.”

It was while finishing up on his film on Syria that he became interested in Ukraine. Jones was in America at the time and every day would read the New York Times, which carried photographs of what was happening Kiev.

“It just looked so beautiful, so cinematic, and it was an area I was obviously very interested in,” he says. Jones had directed a documentary about Putin youth in Moscow previously. They, he tells me, “basically exist to try and stop pro-democracy revolutions”. Now with the events in Kiev, he felt desperate to be there.

So Jones booked his flight for Ukraine and began filming. Then Russia invaded Crimea. “So, suddenly, rather than being just a small story in Ukraine, it became this big international flash point.” Soon PBS Frontline had come on board to fund and support the film.

Jones found particularly unsafe the east of the country where pro-Russian sentiment runs strong. Travelling by road was dangerous as there were checkpoints manned by the rebels. “There have been stories of them stealing people’s cameras, they stole one news crew’s car, steal the flak jacket ... so we just thought it would be better to go on train because it gets straight into the city and then you just make your way into the hotel in a taxi.”

Such foreign escapades can be tricky business describing to the family. He tries to be careful what he tells his mum when travelling to cover dangerous stories. “I remember I went to Crimea when the Russians were invading,” he says. “I deliberately didn’t tell my mum that I was going to Crimea because I knew she would worry. There was a kind of unspoken thing. She knew that I would go there because that is where the story was. But she almost didn’t want to know. My mum worries a lot so if I am doing something really dangerous I try not to tell her.” Networks such as Channel 4 and BBC, he says, are “very good” at doing risk assessment before a dangerous assignment. “You do a 40-page risk assessment before you go,” he says. “It is pretty ruthless. You kind of talk through every possible eventuality.”

The discussion turns to the question of staying objective during filming. In eastern Ukraine, the reception Jones got was far from welcoming. “They didn’t like western journalists,” he says. “They thought we would make stuff up, we were lying. A lot of the time they were quite physically aggressive with me. But you know, when you talk to people, and I speak bit of Russian so that helped. So they kind of thought, maybe this guy is okay.”

He feels you have to make an effort to present a fair picture. “It would be very easy going to Ukraine where in Kiev the people who are involved in the revolution are very friendly to western journalists. So you naturally have more of a bond with them. Whereas in the East the pro-Russians are hostile to you,” he says. “You have just got to be very wary that does not colour the way you report it.”

He talks about Oleg Demchuk, a 17-year-old featured in the documentary, who joins Right Sector, the ultra-nationalist group disliked by many Russians. “Hopefully the film kind of portrays the complexity where this kid is going to go to this revolution believing he is a proud patriot, join this organisation which is probably not where you would want him to join, and he has maybe joined it for a perfectly good reason but Right Sector are very controversial. It would be a terrible mistake for us as filmmakers in America to kind of whitewash Right Sector’s background. They do have Neo Nazi members and that can’t be ignored.”

There is a similar challenge when it comes to covering the pro-Russian factions in the east. “We have got to be fair to them,” he says. “But you know I saw them behaving pretty badly and lots of them are thugs, lots of them are drinking all day. And one of them even admitted to us that they were organised and funded by the Russians. So I think you have got to be equally tough with both sides.”

“The Battle for Ukraine” was the first film Jones reported for, besides also being producer and director. However, it should be said that Jones is not the biggest fan of reporters in documentaries.

“Often I think films are better without reporters,” says Jones. “TV commissioners love having reporters because they think it makes it more accessible to an audience to have a familiar face to guide you through it. But I think that sometimes gives the audience too little credit. I think if you have strong characters, a strong story, better to just let them speak for themselves.”

A particularly successful film Jones directed was “The Secret State of North Korea”. The film relied on a Japanese journalist, Jiro Ishimaru, who has a network of North Koreans who film secretly inside the country. “We got to smuggle footage out and it showed that far from the kind of brainwashed masses we usually see in the media about North Korea, the people themselves were actually questioning their leaders,” he says.

One stunning bit of footage showed an angry woman confronting an army officer. “They were becoming more aware of the outside world which made them more cynical about their leaders,” Jones says. “It just showed that North Korea is as complex a country as any in the world.”

I ask about the significance of music to his work. “Music is incredibly important to me and I think it creates the atmosphere, creates the whole feel of the film,” he says. “Getting the music right is essential. In our North Korea film, we had a composer we worked with, who is brilliant, he is a genius. You are able to work quite closely, tell him the kind of feel that you are going for — dystopian world — and he was able to create music that was quite cutting-edge, quite avant-garde.”

And what of the role of documentaries in the age of social media? “I think the value from long-form documentary, like an hour or longer, is that it is so different from Twitter, Facebook or whatever,” Jones says. He feels we are living in a “golden age” of documentaries. Production costs are going down with cheaper cameras and software. More and more people are willing to go to the cinema to watch documentaries. “People want to go deeper into subjects, it is almost like a reaction against the six seconds you get online to do whatever,” he says.

His films have won a Grierson Award. He has also been nominated for several prizes, including thrice at the BAFTA TV Awards, twice at the Royal Television Society Awards and at One World Media and Prix Europa Awards. More recently his film on North Korea garnered a lot of media coverage, good viewing figures and was shown in over a dozen countries. He was even interviewed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour who described it as “really an incredible documentary”.

With all the achievements under his belt, do his parents still wish he’d become a banker? “It is a good question. I think only about three years ago they came around to the idea that this was going to be my career, I love doing it. And I think now that it is going quite well they have got used to the idea. I think they still worry because it is not a secure career, you are never going to earn lots of money, but they understand that I am doing what I love. I am not going to go to law school,” he laughs.