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.   

In the Fog (V Tumane)

IN THE FOG (V Tumane)                   B          
Russia  Belarus  Latvia  Germany  Netherlands  (127 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Sergei Loznitsa

Official site 

Eyes and ears are poor witnesses for those men, whose souls are of barbarian nature.

—Sergei Loznitsna, film director quoting pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus

Not sure how this film qualifies to play in the European Union Fest, as this is a decisively Russian-Belarus filmmaker, neither country members of the EU, though much of the film was shot in Latvia, the supposed country of EU origin.  Ironically the filmmaker has moved to Germany, a country with one of the best run and most efficient state-assisted cinema programs in all of Europe, allowing him to make films that would be impossible to make in Russia, also helping to produce the financing for his films.  It’s the Russians, however, that have a fondness for their own history and that of the former Soviet territories, where they never forget the terrible price paid in human lives to keep the Germans from overrunning Moscow and Stalingrad in World War II, coming within 20 miles of Moscow before the Russian lines finally held.  Over the course of the war they eventually lost anywhere from 22 to 26 million dead, 15 – 20 % of their entire population defending their nation.  Nearly every family was affected by this kind of dramatic impact, leaving behind for generations to come the terrible scars of history, where no one makes films about this era with more wretched misery than the Russians, who suffered tremendously through this unimaginable horror, perhaps best represented by The Five Best Soviet Era War Films.  Like Trial On the Road (Proverka na dorogakh) (1971), The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) (1976), and Come and See (Idi i smotri) (1985), all set in Belarus and all steeped in the psychological horrors of World War II when the occupying Nazi forces applied a scorched earth policy, burning Belarusian villages to the ground, slaughtering all the inhabitants, literally attempting to wipe Russians off the face of the earth, leaving whatever civilians that survived to starve or die of exposure to the cold.  Carrying the historical weight of Russian history, where more than two million were killed defending the western territory of Belarus, this is a slow moving, morally conflicted, bleak interior drama that takes place far from the front lines, where in the masterful opening shot, out of stillness heads rise out of the lower edge of a snowy forest, as we see German soldiers on horseback marching Russian prisoners into a small Belarusian village to the stare of onlookers.  After a long offscreen pronouncement, set to a slow 180 degree pan, suggesting anyone aiding or abetting those defying the prevailing German order would be shot, the order is given for the men to be publicly hanged.  

   

IN THE FOG is an existential parable much like Malick’s THE THIN RED LINE (1998), an anguished requiem for the dead where the experience of watching the film subjectively involves the viewer in a partnership with history, becoming a transforming meeting of the minds that elevates one’s understanding of events.  Told out of sequence, Loznitsa constructs a war film with no war action, a long, slow slog into the psychological descent into the madness of war, shot with cinematic depth by the same guy (Oleg Mutu) who filmed Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (După dealuri) (2012), supposedly only 72 shots in a little over two hours, where comrades turn against comrades, suspecting there is among them a collaborator for the other side, where there is slow pacing, no musical score, and an intense, interior moral dilemma about what to do.  Its release comes at an interesting time in modern Russian history, where a film about Russian “morality” is an ironic choice during the reinstatement of the dictatorial, KGB-like police state reign of Vladimir Putin.  Perhaps not as intricately constructed as Loznitsa’s earlier brutal road movie My Joy (Schastye moe) (2010), which allowed just the briefest sliver of light, in both mood is paramount to character, told in long takes with near documentary precision through mostly empty, snowy landscapes, an existential journey following two or three characters as they make their way behind enemy lines through the natural protection of the dense forests.  The story concerns Sushenya (Vladimir Svirski), whose story remains a shrouded mystery lost in the fog, revealed only near the end in flashback for the audience’s benefit, where no one in the film ever hears it.  This is the kind of history, personal, family, and national, that gets lost during wartime.  Based on a novel by Belarusian writer Vasily Bykov, Sushenya is a local railroad worker for nearly thirty years, ordered by his boss to continue working for the Germans or he’d be killed, so what real choice does he have?  

Sushenya could just as easily be anybody, as all fell victim to circumstances beyond their control, and he is sympathetically portrayed throughout as he makes his way through a hellish landscape that continually leaves him no choice.  Accused of being a German collaborator, two Soviet partisans arrive out of the forest to execute him, one a lifelong friend who takes no pleasure in his duty.  Instead it’s his friend that is shot and severely wounded in an unexpected ambush, where Sushenya is forced to carry him on his back in an absurdist Sisyphus reference as they attempt to make their way to safety.  Despite their partisan loyalties, each man is viewed traveling this isolated journey alone, as that is how they will be judged by history, expressed through extended minimalist sequences of long shots trekking through the wintry forest where man is nearly inconsequential, a mere solitary speck, engulfed in the immense natural landscape and of time immemorial.  Sushenya is continually judged by others, Nazi’s and partisans, even his own family, where during wartime, a full accounting of the truth never comes out until the distance of time passes and people can objectively investigate facts, circumstances and allegations.  But during the imposition of unspeakable violence and the blurry events of war, everything comes down to immediate perceptions, where Sushenya can’t believe why his wife or his lifelong friends would choose to believe the German accounts rather than his own, doubting his pleas of innocence, somehow forgetting everything that they ever knew about him because of an accusation from Nazi criminals and cutthroat murderers.  All that he knows about humanity quickly spins on its ear, where everything that matters is suddenly gone forever, leaving him in a state of abject misery and horror.  This kind of nightmarish journey takes us to the other side of darkness where the end of the world is near, very similar to the coming apocalypse expressed in Béla Tarr’s last film The Turin Horse (2011).  While Tarr visually expresses the external reality, Loznitsa explores the last gasp, the internalized personal anguish of all light going out of the world, and, if not for Loznitsa and this film, all would be forgotten.

Beyond the Hills (După dealuri)

BEYOND THE HILLS (După dealuri)             B                     

Romania  France  Belgium  (150 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Cristian Mungiu

Mungiu has written and/or adapted a story inspired by the non-fiction novels of contemporary Romanian author Tatiana Niculescu Bran, a former senior editor of the Bucharest branch of the BBC News division, supposedly basing this story on real events, where there was also a 2007 stage version.  Despite its length, much of the film’s story remains shrouded under an ambiguous cloud of uncertainty, where little backstory is provided and the true nature of the two protagonist’s (both non-professionals) relationship is never revealed other than they both spent their childhood in a state orphanage, most likely subjected to systematic abuse.  When they left the orphanage, they apparently took different turns, where Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) has been fully accepted into a remote convent in rural Romania, which by embracing God seems to have given her a purpose in life, where a rhythm of life is established by observing a myriad of duties performed by each of the nuns in a collective spirit of worship and devotion.  Her friend Alina (Cristina Flutur) has other ideas, as she’s visiting Voichita with hopes of rekindling a former love affair where they could run off together.  Voichita is fully committed to God, however, but embraces Alina in her heart, as outside of Alina’s mentally challenged brother, the two of them have no living family, so they remain closely attached to each another.  It’s clear from the outset Alina has no interest in God or the monastery, but just wants her lover, while Voichita covers up her friend’s real intent and instead offers pleas to the Mother Superior and Orthodox Priest to have mercy on her as she has noplace else to go, proposing the idea that embracing God may offer what she needs, as it has for everyone else, which buys them some time together. 

Alina, however, has a mean-tempered and violent streak, apparently exacerbated after being urged to offer a full confession, where the audience never learns the depth of inner torment she was forced to release, but her violent behavior afterwards offers a hint as to its toxic nature, as she starts cussing out and attacking some of the nuns, where they literally tie her in restraints to keep her from hurting anyone before taking her to the hospital where she is medicated.  Likely because there’s no monetary incentive, the hospital provides only the basic level of care, where much of this feels like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), as the hospital doesn’t wish to run further tests, even though there are signs she may suffer from schizophrenia, so they simply avoid responsibility by passing her back to the monastery, suggesting rest is what she needs.  This plays into the stereotypical view that monasteries are all about quiet prayer and reflection, but due to the rugged location of this particular religious community, much of their time is spent doing hard work outdoors.  Initially Alina is calm as she’s been prescribed medications, where she is compliant, and due to the urging of Voichita, makes feeble attempts to embrace God, but the obsession with sin, combined with the fact she likely stopped taking her medication, seems to drive her over the edge, where her instability is affecting the overall harmony of the community, so the Priest sends her back to her last foster family, but they’ve already replaced her with somebody else and literally have no room.  With their return once again, the Priest is running out of options. 

What’s immediately apparent to anyone in the audience is that Alina does not belong in a monastery, but Voichita’s continual pleas to the authorities suggest otherwise, where she’s literally cramming God down this girl’s throat because she knows no other option.  This narrow view of religion seems to be the focus of the film—that people don’t really pray for others as they mostly pray for themselves, using religion for whatever selfish reasons they can imagine.  The Priest is no more interested in helping Alina than the hospital, as both just wish to be rid of her, but instead of doing the charitable thing, which would be reaching out into the nearby community that they service and finding her a family or another church where she could stay temporarily, but instead both institutions exist in an island unto themselves, separate and apart from the real world.  Voichita is not the most educated and her attempts to help end up doing more harm than good, but her motives are well-meaning—she simply doesn’t know any better. The film goes off the rails, somewhat, when the church's narrow views prevail, protecting their own interests, literally existing in their own mythology, completely abandoning common sense or a connection to modernity, becoming a backwater religion retreating to the 5th century by resurrecting ancient religious rituals, desperately performing an exorcism to drive the evil spirits out of Alina, whose only real sin appears to be continually questioning the legitimacy of God on earth, as in her life God’s mercy has been all but absent.  Shot in ‘Scope by Oleg Mutu, the winterized countryside becomes a fully realized, silent character in the film, as it provides much of the film’s compositional texture, where the visualized naturalism is starkly bleak, without a hint of music, as people wear winter jackets to sleep in, and every breath has an icy chill.  But the film fails to generate the same impact as 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamâni... (2007), as the people onscreen are less compelling and not as disturbingly intense, veering into a state of melodramatic hysteria late in the film that just feels overly contrived and all too predictable.