Nuestra Tierra (Our Land)

 

Director Lucrecia Martel

director on the set

Mercedes Sosa

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NUESTRA TIERRA  (Our Land)                 A-                                                                          aka:  Landmarks                                                                                                                      Argentina  Mexico  France  Netherlands  Denmark  USA  (123 mi)  2025  d: Lucrecia Martel

This film works with our mother tongue and its racist complexities, which prevent many from accessing a vital space.  The language of documents.  The lives of people expelled by papers of dubious value, lives lost in hours of useless procedures.  A historical document is the script of a scene that never existed, but that suits those who sign it.  Here, cinema can be useful.                  —Director Lucrecia Martel

Lucrecia Martel is a largely self-taught queer director who is part of a New Wave of Argentinian filmmakers coming after decades of political and economic crises, including a brutal Dirty War military dictatorship responsible for the disappearance of 30,000 people between 1976 and 1983, which remains prominent in collective memory, opening up new avenues to explore what was previously forbidden.  After gaining acceptance to the country’s only state-sponsored film school, the National School of Film Experimentation and Production (ENERC), with only 30 accepted out of more than a thousand applicants, just as classes were about to begin the school shut down due to lack of funds, leaving her on her own to follow her pursuits, which meant she simply immersed herself into watching and analyzing as many films as possible.  After winning a public script competition, this led to one of her first short films, THE DEAD KING (REY MUERTO) (1995), a feminist western about a woman who escapes her abusive, alcoholic husband with her three children in a small town called Rey Muerto, exhibited in Argentina as part of a larger omnibus film, a collection of short films from all across the country, something that was unprecedented at the time, as it showcased a compilation of new voices.  Since then, Martel has gone on to make four features, LA CIÉNAGA (2001), a masterwork of claustrophobic cinema, THE HOLY GIRL (2004), a coming-of-age psychological drama, THE HEADLESS WOMN (2008), a metaphysical ghost story about Argentina's refusal to acknowledge a widening economic disparity between the middle and lower classes, a trio known as the Salta Trilogy, each having been filmed in her home province and focusing on women and girls who operate outside the social norms, followed by Zama (2017), a period commentary on colonialism and masculinity.  Martel began working on the film in 2010, so if anything ZAMA is the sequel, yet if the extensive credits indicate anything, there was a massive amount of research and more than 400 hours of film to comb through.  Her first feature in eight years, a scathing rebuke to the atrocities of colonialism, past and present, Martel denounces how Argentina has been built on the plunder of indigenous peoples and how history is actually a fiction, a systematic construction of lies meant to conceal and legitimize crimes.  For the director, a country cannot be built on plunder and injustice, where hundreds of years of history have been systematically erased.  The real question this films asks is why do these things happen, as the filmmaker is committed to returning to this indigenous Chuschagasta community what has been stolen from them, their stories and their images, drawn from about 5000 photographs, some, very moving, taken by Javier Chocobar himself, a man at the center of a murder investigation.  Martel is known for her elliptical storytelling, sensory sound design, and hypersensual cinema, with a focus on class and colonial decay, immersing viewers in intimate, humid spaces, leaving out standard exposition for avant-garde techniques, forcing the audience to figure out what is going on.  Martel’s atmospheric films can sometime do the unthinkable and unimaginable as they explore the moral, physical, psychological, and social decay of characters willfully blind to the historical violence and the continuing social costs that pay for their privilege.  Rarely using background music, where the sound design offers a richer meaning, her subtle, minimalist films often take place in her native Salta, Argentina, the province just north of Tucumán, where the hot, sticky environments act as metaphors for social inertia and trapped desire.  It’s important to point out that in Spanish, “Nuestra tierra” means both “our land” and “our Earth,” something that gets lost in the English translation.  This is a film that not only counters the nation’s official history, but is most remarkable in revealing how that truth has been fabricated.

In her first documentary feature, Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel investigates the 2009 murder of indigenous activist Javier Chocobar, who was shot and killed while defending his community’s land and from being forcibly evicted from their land by a local white landowner Darío Amín, a wealthy rancher and miner and two former police officers, one of whom can be heard on a video recording, “Nobody listens to them in court,” leaving two other community members seriously wounded as well.  Alternating between footage of this controversial, long-delayed (9 years after the incident) trial, which hinges on a shaky cell-phone video, testimonials from Chuschagasta community members who have called the Tucumán Province in northwest Argentina their home for untold generations, and aerial drone footage of the stunning province Chocobar fought to defend.  What’s truly unique about this film is how it not only puts the accused men on trial, with footage of public court testimony, but the entire country of Argentina on trial through extensive research into the thefts of land over centuries, turning bureaucracy into a weapon that entirely sanctions murder of indigenous life, expanding into a searing examination of centuries-old colonial violence, eviction, land exploitation, and cultural erasure that continue to shape Latin America today, essentially turning indigenous communities invisible and wiping them off the map with proclamations that they no longer exist, while then opening up their lands and resources to the highest bidder.  Co-written by Martel and María Alché, who was the star in THE HOLY GIRL, working with historian Milena Acosta, the film poses the question, who really owns the land, which once belonged exclusively to the indigenous until colonialist intruders took the land by force, literally stealing it right out from under them with no legal consequences, as the law typically ignored indigenous rights, where the country never faced investigative scrutiny - - until this film, which starts out as one thing, examining what happened in the killing of a Chuschagasta leader, questioning the evidence and court testimony in this specific case, where at one point, we see Chocobar’s widow pleading, “Is God a witness to all this?”  Martel then broadens that search into an existential question of who really owns the land, as those who claimed to hold the titles obtained them by unscrupulous means, through land auctions by sellers who never actually held them either, an egregious example of state-enabled land theft, premised on the fiction of Terra nullius, or “nobody’s land,” that has justified the colonial invasion of indigenous lands for centuries.  To the Chuschagasta community, no one person owns the land, as it belongs to all of them.  It’s a bit surprising when the actual murder trial begins asking these unanswerable questions, with historians brought in to describe the evolution of bogus titles, while the indigenous communities themselves have lived on that land for as long as they can remember, providing photographs, family memorabilia, and personal accounts of growing up there, where even the native people were unaware they were indigenous.  “We were taught what the books said,” as according to Argentine history, the indigenous peoples, those who were called the “indios (Indians),” disappeared after the Spanish colonization, yet their existence is undeniable, with Martel paying cinematic tribute to people who were systematically erased from history, revealing how the historical fractures of Argentina continue to manifest in the present.  History has been present in all of Martel’s earlier films, all but this one taking place in the northwest Salta region, yet this happened just 300 kilometers from where she lives, where so many have indigenous heritage, but never explored with this degree of investigation that incorporates meticulous historical research.  Since the end of the military dictatorship, the reconstruction of democracy has depended on an ongoing public and political negotiation of just what constitutes history.

Because historians denied the very existence of indigenous peoples, perpetuated by the Church and academics, this opened up avenues to legitimize land appropriation, leading to collusions between landowners and the police, as farmers and developers were allowed to harvest the land, using indigenous workers as unpaid labor, basically stealing their crops and animals, and then charging them for it.  As it turns out, the three men who happened to visit the Chuschagasta community land were land developers there to drive the native community off the land they had been living in for almost 400 years to recover a mining quarry located in the center of their territory.  This is a tactic that had been used for decades, so for generations, this is what indigenous communities faced and were used to, acknowledging that as soon as the developers indicated they just wanted to talk, this was a sign that they would eventually lose something, as they never just wanted to talk.  Implicit in these tactics is the underlying belief that the indigenous have no sovereignty on their land, that white privilege allows them to take what they want.  And on this occasion as well, the day of the murder, this is how the conversation began, yet these three were also the only ones to bring guns and use them, firing nine shots, threatened by the larger crowd that was gathering, though no one, not a single individual, was armed, used force, or actually threatened them in any way, as they simply witnessed what was happening, and took pictures, which was the best way to deal with developers who want to conduct their business in private, out of sight and away from any accountability, where they could simply take what they wanted by force, incident by incident, thoroughly convinced of the righteousness of their cause, and in the inferiority of the native peoples, an example of racism, paternalism, and infantilization.  No legal channels had ever stopped this type of conduct and behavior before, but this murder was different, as there were so many witnesses, even a jagged cellphone video that was presented at trial, allowing the entire world to see for themselves and make their own determination, though once a series of shots was fired, the camera remained fixed on the ground, where all you can hear are screams, heavy breathing, and the chaotic sounds of a physical struggle.  This wider scope, as well as the filming of the trial, and a recreation of the crime scene itself, which drew plenty of publicity, with the police flying their own drones, placed a different kind of pressure on the courts, where “the whole world was watching,” to quote Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), so it required that they dig a little deeper in their examination of who really owns the land, and just what constitutes a crime.  Martel deviates from anything resembling standard documentary filmmaking, allowing the Chuschagasta community to speak for themselves, offering a heavily archived rebuttal to the axiom, “history is written by the victors,” creating a visceral space that lets viewers absorb the racist, colonialist complexities of the legal and social systems in Argentina, connecting the past and present.  Opening with NASA space station images of Earth accompanied by the Kyrie from Misa Criolla, composed by Ariel Ramírez and sung by the legendary Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa, Mercedes Sosa - Misa Criolla - Kyrie YouTube (5:02), an indigenous woman from Tucumán, and a member of the communist party, forced into exile in Europe after facing censorship, arrests on stage, and severe death threats from the military regime in Argentina.  Martel chose this piece because it represents the Catholic faith embraced by the local indigenous communities, yet sung by a non-believer, and, to an Argentine ear, highlights an indigenous voice, perhaps for the very first time.  By the end of the film, we hear her sing another song about the land, a beautiful homage to the working class, nature, and the dream of justice and peace, Mercedes Sosa - Cuando tenga la tierra HD (Alta Calidad) YouTube (3:38)

This actually recalls a similar languid style of Chilean filmmaker Marcela Said’s The Summer of Flying Fish (El verano de los peces voladores) (2013), where the visualization of the immense landscape is paramount, drawing attention to its vast permanence, where its primordial existence came long before any human beings set foot, creating this elusive realm that is difficult to understand, as it existed in all its glory before any human communities were established.  But once schools, railroads, and newspapers began telling tales, stories were told only from the point of view of the colonial invaders, never from the indigenous people who actually lived there.  To that end, this film is eye-opening, beautifully shot by Ernesto De Carvalho, as it tends to accentuate the land through extensive drone footage sweeping across the mostly untouched hills and valleys, where cows or horses may be seen in their native habitat, yet after a bird smashes into a drone, things suddenly appear upside down, suggesting the truth may be more complex and harder to comprehend than we realize.  This extreme visualization draws viewers into the subject matter, allowing the land itself to become a central character, where the question of “ownership” becomes a touchy subject, as Argentine citizens once legally “owned” slaves from the 16th to the 19th centuries, having brought them across an ocean to their shores to perform most of the heavy work, living in brutally harsh conditions where they had no rights whatsoever, but were routinely punished or shackled for the most minor infringements.  There are no books in school that were told from the point of view of the slaves, as they were not allowed to read or write, so their historical perspective, like the indigenous, was never told.  Earlier this year, Argentina made international news for being one of only three countries (the other two being Israel and the U.S.) to vote against a UN resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade a crime against humanity (The myth of white Argentina still shapes the nation | Slavery), while in November 2024, Argentina was the only country to vote against a United Nations draft resolution on indigenous rights.  Some from the indigenous communities described the long distances and dangerous river crossings they had to endure just to get to school, where they were continually abused and disrespected and treated like garbage, yet they exhibit no hostile or angry reaction, as they are essentially peaceful and adaptable.  Their input is invaluable in this film, as it exposes an entire culture that has been declared dead and remained invisible for centuries, yet behind these individual stories, which have never been told, there are literally hundreds of thousands of other stories behind them, without which today’s voices would never be heard.  While Argentine President Javier Milei has systematically defunded the INCAA, Argentina's National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts, as his government is very much against cinema and its new generation of filmmakers, Martel has raised a topic that is absolutely crucial to her provincial region, opening a dialogue with an otherwise silenced indigenous collective memory that is historically marked by plunder, placing in the foreground the social cracks of Argentina.  For Martel, cinema is “a tool of transformation,” where this is a deeply humane documentary posing legal and existential questions that really have no answers, forcing viewers to make their own determinations.  One of the most memorable shots takes place inside a massive Catholic church, where one of the stained glass panels exhibits a shot of God hurling thunderbolts at the presumably “bad” indigenous people, as if by divine order, to make way for the Argentinian heroes.  And while this may not be what anyone would describe as a riveting account, with plenty of meandering along the way, as if getting lost in the questions, this does have a unique and distinct point of view that makes it essential viewing.   

Two Prosecutors (Zwei Staatsanwälte)

 

Director Sergei Loznitsa

director at Cannes with Alexsandr Kuznetsov

Georgy Demidov

TWO PROSECUTORS (Zwei Staatsanwälte)          B+                                                      France  Germany  Netherlands  Latvia  Romania  Lithuania  Ukraine  (118 mi)  2025  d: Sergei Loznitsa

The time has come to look the Soviet monster directly in the eye.  It must be understood in order to be defeated.                                                                                                                              —Director Sergei Loznitsa

Grim, austere, and relentlessly bleak, Loznitsa reminds us what falling into authoritarianism really feels like, as evidenced by the height of Stalin repression in 1937, which is meticulously dissected and explored from the inside, in the jail cells and in the halls of power, exposed with surgical precision, where arrest warrants leading to deaths proceed with miraculous efficiency.  What this Kafkaesque parable suggests is a government’s insistence on the appearance of legality while undermining the entire system by arresting and jailing all dissenting voices, using the prisons as a wave of terror against these individuals, denying them any and all legal rights once they’ve become the exclusive property of a Gulag prison system, never again allowed to see the light of day, as the government runs on complete systematic repression.  Winner of The François Chalais Award (Prix François Chalais) at Cannes in 2025, an award that recognizes the esteemed values of journalism, and the Palić Best Film Award, the top prize at the European Film Festival in Palić, Serbia, the slowly developing story is told in a way that requires extreme patience, as the pace is glacial, allowing plenty of time to ruminate over what we see, with a patient yet unmistakable sense of foreboding, focusing on the devastating minutiae that allows fascism to breed, expressed by the impassive coldness of officers and authorities, as well as the silences of the corridors.  From the maker of My Joy (Schastye moe) (2010), a haunting parable of post-Communist Russia, In the Fog (V Tumane) (2012), a sobering meditation on the complicated moral decisions faced by both soldiers and citizens during wartime, and Babi Yar. Context (2021), which shows how Ukrainians were complicit in the Nazi Babi Yar massacre of Jews, there is probably no director who has documented the criminal history of Russia in such an extensive way as Loznitsa, who has lived in Germany since 2001, yet still prefers to call himself a Russian, objecting to a total boycott on Russian artists and culture, which got him expelled from the Ukrainian Film Academy, where this film, spoken mostly in Russian (viewed as the language of the aggressor), has been banned in both Russia and Ukraine.  The born-in-Belarus yet raised in Ukraine director knows a thing or two about Russia, as his documentary films in particular provide an archival, historical document of the horrors from Russian/Soviet history, where the grounds of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was one of the first targeted sites that was hit by Russian missiles and shells during the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (Russia strikes Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial site in Ukraine).  This film serves as a monument to authoritarianism, where maintaining power and control through abject fear is the paramount concern, where the number of prisoners in Russia rose from about 180,000 in 1930 to more than 5 million by the mid 30’s, where a wave of arrests by the secret police, or the NKVD, the Gestapo-like organization that was responsible for the arrests, tortures, deaths, and massacres of millions of people, with millions more falling victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, mass shootings, and starvation.  It’s important to remember that Time magazine put Stalin on its cover 11 times, named Man of the Year twice in 1939 and 1942, as the world was simply oblivious to the grandiose scale of cover-ups of the mass atrocities.  From July 1937 to mid-November 1938 alone, about 1.5 million people, including most of the leaders of the October 1917 Revolution, were arrested, shot, kidnapped, or detained in Gulag camps, where it may come as no surprise that in today’s Russia, the Stalin era is glorified.  The entire film takes place largely in two locations, a cavernous penal colony, which was actually shot in a hundred-year old Brasa prison in Riga, Latvia that is now closed, and the massive halls of justice in Moscow, where the film title only begins to describe how the legal process, which is supposedly available to everyone, in fact shuts the door, yet maintains, on the surface, an avenue of legality, but the NKVD intervenes and undermines any hint of legality at every turn, reaching an unimaginable level of systematic arrests, humiliation, and torture, which may as well be a blueprint into the present.  

Recalling the banality of evil from Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), the source material for the film is a novel by the same name written by Georgy Demidov, a Russian-born Soviet experimental physicist and political prisoner from the Kharkiv Technical Institute in Ukraine who was wrongfully arrested in 1938 and spent 14-years in the brutally harsh conditions of the KOLYMA PRISON CAMP in Siberia, a Gulag he referred to as “Auschwitz without the ovens,” where emaciated and starving prisoners were routinely fed only 400 calories per day.  After he was released, he documented the cruel realities of camp life through short stories and novellas, primarily focusing upon the physical and psychological destruction of scientists, intellectuals, and artists under Soviet rule, a phenomenon known as Eliticide.  In 1980, the KGB raided his home, destroyed his typewriters, without which he could not write, as his fingers had been frozen in the Gulag, and confiscated all his manuscripts, where Demidov died in 1987 believing his life’s work was lost forever.  However, following the collapse of the Soviet Union just a few years later, his daughter recovered his surviving manuscripts from KGB archives, and his collected works were later published in six volumes in Russia.  Unlike other famous camp writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Varlam Shalamov, whom he befriended in prison, Demidov wrote with a sharp focus on individual characters and the Kafkaesque absurdities of state power.  What stands out here is just how chillingly accurate it is, recreated in cold, meticulous detail, getting right into the psychological mindset of the people portrayed and the ruthless system of oppression that erodes every avenue of hope and freedom, continually finding new ways to brutalize their own people, with the Russia of today hurtling back toward Stalinism.  At the center of the picture is a young principled Bolshevik prosecutor, Alexander Kornev (Alexsandr Kuznetsov), only three months removed from law school in the city of Bryansk, some 200 miles southwest of Moscow, yet he’s filled with the revolutionary ideals and beliefs of a true patriot about building a better socialist society, keeping his own personal thoughts to himself, making him hard to read, revealing next to nothing about himself, always remaining calmly measured and restrained.  He becomes a prosecutor at the very moment when the country was in a process of radical change in a way that wasn’t necessarily understood by the rest of the population.  Against all odds, as prisoner letters are routinely burned before ever leaving the heavily guarded premises, but one, written in his own blood on a tiny piece of cardboard, somehow makes it to the desk of this young prosecutor, who is summoned to the local prison by an Old Bolshevik named Stepniak (Alexander Filippenko), like a cry for help, or an answer to his prayers.  Kornev’s ominous arrival to the prison is met by a chorus of silent women standing across the street, mothers, sisters, and daughters of men who are imprisoned inside, waiting for any word, as inmates are strictly forbidden from contacting anyone on the outside.  Built around dialogue gripped by fear, where every spoken word may have devastating consequences, as seemingly harmless encounters can lead to arrests, the staging is minimalist, so precisely constructed and so skillfully staged, essentially built around fewer than ten scenes, mostly unfolding in a series of private conversations, dominated by fixed shots and symmetrical compositions, bare environments, and suffocating silences that speak, disturbingly, of the present.  The goal of expunging all critics and enemies is to consolidate an elite group of loyal supporters whose allegiance lies strictly with Stalin, much like Trump and Putin have similarly targeted political enemies and systematically eliminated all opposition by surrounding themselves with nothing but blindly obedient followers.

Literally half the film is spent waiting with Kornev waiting to pass through the various layers of prison bureaucracy, who have no interest whatsoever in allowing him to see the prisoner, culminating with the Prison Governor (Vytautas Kaniušonis) offering him a litany of excuses, but he persists, waiting for hours, until they finally agree to the meeting, where he has to pass through a labyrinth of locked gates and doors, always accompanied by a hostile group of implacable faces from the warily suspicious assembled guards who are not pleased by his presence.  When we finally meet the feeble, starved, and thoroughly broken-down prisoner, he’s the kind of character we rarely see in films, a historical icon, having been there at the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution, filled with the promise of building a new and better society, only to fall victim of the tactics of the NKVD, who have spent years torturing him, and other loyal party members like him, into confessing crimes they never committed, where “honest, knowledgeable experts are substituted by ignorant charlatans,” a line that is sure to draw snickers from American audiences, as it’s a pattern recognized so well in the Trump administration.  Stepniak’s body may have endured endless atrocities, where he’s nearing the end from organ failure, yet his mind is still sharp, making him a fascinating subject of interest, with Kornev recalling how he attended one of Stepniak's speeches about truth and Bolshevism at his law school, where he was immediately impacted by the force of his ideas, impressed that he also belonged to the former party leadership in his hometown.  It’s hard not to be intrigued by this man, finding his beliefs and the essential value of his work suddenly deemed anti-revolutionary, making him an enemy of the state.  Yet he actually stands for something, as opposed to Stalin’s secret police who simply want to erase his existence, as that’s what authoritarians do.  There’s a major difference in conceiving ideas and beliefs, literally building something out of nothing, with the hopes of transforming an entire society, and the parallel course of killing and destroying anything that has to do with planting that seed, where murder is the ultimate political weapon.  With a heavy reliance on dialogue, it’s rare for films to so exquisitely expose profound and radical ideas with this degree of simplicity, where nothing is left to the imagination, as we are literally taken inside this hellhole, an example of immersive cinema, with the film designed to plunge viewers into the psychological mindset of the times, seeing the profound effects, where if the guards could have their way, this prosecutor would never again see the light of day, TWO PROSECUTORS - New Sergei Loznitsa movie ... YouTube (1:17).   But Stepniak urges Kornev to visit Stalin, or members of the Politburo, and do whatever it takes to get as close to the highest powers of the land with a message of what goes on inside these prison walls, as it’s a crime against the revolution.  Accordingly, Kornev takes a train to Moscow, but on route his attempts at sleep are interrupted by an extended monologue from the wildly eccentric old man named Pegleg (also played by Alexander Filippenko), who tells tales about losing a leg and an arm fighting for the Soviets in the Battle of Kowel in WWI, one of the fiercest battles in history, and how he met with Lenin personally in Smolny for war disability benefits, touting his generosity, now seeking an audience with Stalin.  Inspired by Captain Kopeikin from the biting critique of mass corruption in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, this underlines the disenchantment of the Old Leninist Guard, described as “the true believers,” with the direction of the revolution, where half of the Red Army’s entire officer corps was either killed or imprisoned, filling the screen with an omnipresent dread, as it shows how authoritarian systems actually destroy their own ideals, where Stalinism was the antithesis of Bolshevism, something only the Trotskyites truly understood, making them targets as well.

While the first part of the film is a hellish, Dante’s Inferno allegory, where the gates of Hell bear the inscription, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” the second part exudes a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare, shot inside the marble halls of the old Latvian Radio building in Riga, a Soviet relic constructed in the Stalinist Empire style, the only Latvian public service station to broadcast in Russian.  Swallowed inside the massive interior space, where it’s easy to get lost inside a maze of offices and corridors, with a giant, winding staircase reaching upstairs, Kornev seeks a meeting with the Procurator General, the highest-ranking law officer in the entire country, but is turned away by his secretary (Nerijus Gadliauskas), a man who is fastidious about manners and details, as he has no appointment, but Kornev is persistent, refusing to take no for an answer, so he waits and waits, like the brilliant opening sequence in Orson Welles’ THE TRIAL (1962), Orson Welles- The Trial: Before The Law - Prologue | Franz ... YouTube (2:51), until everyone else has been seen, and only then does the secretary allow him entrance.  Sitting in front of a statue of Stalin, where above that bust hangs a portrait of Lenin, the second prosecutor, Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy) commands immediate attention and respect, never remotely cracking a smile, calm, yet stern, and acutely intelligent, with a sharp ear for details, never missing a thing, where the two prosecutors are intentionally pitted as mirror images of one another, both tasked with rooting out corruption and investigating state crimes.  Knowingly bypassing the local authorities in Bryansk because he knows they’ve been infiltrated by the NKVD, Kornev acts as an ambassador for Stepniak, recounting the egregious conditions there, revealing how the NKVD have rounded up, arrested, and then tortured or killed all the Old Bolsheviks into confessing purely fictional crimes, then using those confessions to issue death warrants, with Vyshinsky shockingly displaying a sympathetic ear, as if hearing these accusations for the first time, Two Prosecutors new clip official from Cannes Film Festival ...  YouTube (55 seconds), indicating he needs medical evidence of the scars of torture if he is to proceed, instructing Kornev to provide that evidence.  Acknowledging that would be paramount to political suicide, as the NKVD would arrest him for crimes against the state, Vyshinsky offers legal protections, starting with evidence they had this face-to-face meeting, guaranteed train passage, along with official documents authorizing him to conduct further investigations.  Kornev leaves hopefully, fully aware of the grave consequences at stake, finding himself sitting in a compartment shared with two jovial men who describe themselves as factory inspector engineers, Vasily (Valentin Novopolskij) and Petya (Dmitrijus Denisiukas), where they toast to Soviet law, with Vasily gleefully singing Shostakovich’s the counterplan song on guitar, which repeats itself over the end credits performed by a full choir, "The Song of the Counter-Plan" [Песня о Встречном] - Soviet ... YouTube (2:45), as it was seen and heard in the 1932 film COUNTERPLAN by Sergei Yutkevich and Fridrikh Ermler.  Whatever inklings viewers may have had up to this point, Kornev becomes the Josef K. of his own story, as the chilling final shot is nothing less than shocking, revealing the true scope of Stalin’s Great Purge, which literally engulfs the entire country in a shroud of death.  Clearly as much about Putin’s Russia as Stalin’s, it should be noted that all three of these Russian actors, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, and Anatoli Beliy, left Russia after Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022, where their performances offer a testimony of political resistance.  Impeccably shot by Oleg Mutu, typically associated with Romanian director Cristian Mungiu and his Palme d’Or winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile) (2007), but also Beyond the Hills (După dealuri) (2012), so detailed and precise, with no camera movement whatsoever, only static shots that intensify the creeping paranoia and full-blown claustrophobia, a world where colors are almost non-existent, this is a full-blown horror story that we’re not likely to forget.