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| Director Sergei Loznitsa |
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| director at Cannes with Alexsandr Kuznetsov |
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| 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.
