Fiume O Morte!

 

Gabriele D'Annunzio

D'Annunzio (in the middle with the stick) in Fiume, 1919

D'Annunzio (in the middle in uniform) with Italian publisher Arnoldo Mondadori

Director Igor Bezinović

Gabriele D’Annunzio, September 1919

Elon Musk Roman/fascist salute during Trump inauguration, January 2025

FIUME O MORTE!               B+                                                                                         Croatia  Italy  Slovenia  (112 mi)  2025  d: Igor Bezinović

Director Statement, Igor Bezinović

By making this film I wanted to get to know the past of my hometown Rijeka/Fiume, but also to get to understand its present state from a new perspective. During this process I’ve met hundreds of my fellow citizens who wanted to work on the film in front of the camera or behind it. I’ve met drivers, politicians, dustbin collectors, archivists, doormen, cooks, musicians, professors, translators and waiters who all had ideas about what this film should be like. I’ve also met historians of all kinds, from those who saw D’Annunzio as the crazier version of Mussolini to the ones who saw him as the Italian Che Guevara.

Besides meeting new people I’ve also read thousands and thousands of pages on D’Annunzio in Fiume, and while doing it I was not only gathering facts but was also shaping my own political ideas.

One idea, however, stayed clear to me all the way. That idea is formulated in a political pamphlet published in Fiume in 1922, soon after D’Annunzio’s departure: “Long live Fiume, free and independent from any kind of rescuers, liberators and protectors!”

I made a film with my fellow citizens and for my fellow citizens, building a chronological story that we’ll be able, I hope, to retell to new generations. I also hope that our film will help the audiences outside of Rijeka think about how much they know about the histories of their own hometowns and about how these histories got remembered and retold.

In his lesser-known essay from 1960, Pier Paolo Pasolini calls D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume a “pagliacciata narcisistica,” “a narcissistic farce.” D’Annunzio saw Fiume as a personal playground, as a place where he could experiment and practice everything that came to his mind.

By making this film I wanted to keep D’Annunzio’s idea of Rijeka/Fiume as a playground, but this time the citizens of Rijeka are the ones who are playing.

Far-right authoritarianism is on the rise around the world, threatening democracies everywhere, with its fascist clutches gripping even the United States, as this film conveys a timely warning against the rise of global far-right authoritarianism.  Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was the blueprint model for the American right wing, apparently enthralled by the ease in how he systematically dismantled the country’s legal system and changed the election system to ensure future election victories.  By rigging the elections and at the same time stripping the nation’s legal authority to challenge the results, Orbán was also withdrawing media licenses for independent journalists, with ownership of the media increasingly shifting to oligarchs allied with Prime Minister Orbán’s government, making state-owned broadcasters controlled by the ruling party.  If this doesn’t sound like what’s happening in America right now, then you haven’t been paying attention.  But it’s not just happening here, as there are examples throughout history, with this Croatian filmmaker taking a look back at his own country’s turbulent history one hundred years ago, where he decides to recreate a little-known moment in history, while having a little fun in the process, creating a visionary, boldly inventive work of art that is original and genuinely eye opening, while at the same time informative.  Coming from the last generation of Tito’s pioneers, Union of Pioneers of Yugoslavia, Igor Bezinović is a filmmaker born in Rijeka, graduating in film directing at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb and in Philosophy, Sociology, and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb.  Nestled in an inlet of the Adriatic Sea, Rijeka/Fiume is now the third largest city in Croatia, but it has frequently changed hands throughout history, changing its country of origin at least nine different times in the 20th century alone, as just after WWI it belonged to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, before that partly the Kingdom of Italy and partly the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and before that the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, before that the Free State of Fiume, before that the Italian Regency of Carnaro, and before that the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

That’s a bit of a swallow, so to make things easier to comprehend, Bezinović asks citizens of his own city if they know who Gabriele D’Annunzio is, getting many different answers, but most do not, as he’s a forgotten footnote in history, which the filmmaker delightfully brings back to life with the participation of around 100 non‑professional actors and extras, not unlike what Robert Greene constructed with Bisbee '17 (2018), where it’s 30-minutes in before the title card appears, named after his political slogan.  What defines our identity?  What makes us who we are?  Combining archival footage of one of the most photographed events of the time, including video footage, interviews, and reenactments, Bezinović engages about three hundred locals to re-enact a rather surreal 16-month occupation in 1919 when D’Annunzio declared himself the de facto dictator of Fiume, the Italian name for the city, as the decadent Italian poet, playwright, orator, journalist, aristocrat, flamboyant public persona, and Royal Italian Army officer during World War I preached an ultra-right Italian nationalism after the war that was a predecessor to Benito Mussolini’s full-blown fascism.  Bezinović ironically remarks at the beginning of the film that the “film represents a mirror of today’s time,” while visually exploring buildings and streets that bore D’Annunzio’s name during the fascist period, noting “My Italian colleagues warned me not to mention fascism too much in the intro for the sake of Italian viewers, so I’ll stop here.”  But if truth be told, he doesn’t exactly heed their suggestion, as the film is praised in Croatia while attracting little attention in Italy, where D’Annunzio is still celebrated in Italy as a national hero, erecting a statue in Trieste about seventy kilometers away on the 100th anniversary of the occupation of Fiume, with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni photographed in front of it, praising D’Annunzio as a man who ruled “with courage and audacity,” while in Croatia he is remembered as a megalomaniacal fascist occupier. 

Amusingly shot by Gregor Božič, there are seven different bald-headed actors drawn from the city streets who play D’Annunzio, with Bezinović announcing each change, while the narrators keep changing as well, each adding a different aspect.  The story of D’Annunzio’s occupation is narrated in the local Fiumano language, a variety of the Venetian dialect historically spoken by the Italian community of Fiume, yet as Bezinović notes in the first parts of the film, this is “no longer spoken or understood by most people in Rijeka,” yet the changing languages is a realistic aspect that reflects upon the city itself, part of the cosmopolitan, multi-cultural history of Rijeka and part of the linguistic tapestry in present-day Croatia, where that diversity is something D’Annunzio despised yet the film revels in, pretty much rubbing our noses in it.  Like Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, it’s the irreverent absurdity that stands out, where modern-day re-enactments show how the events of the past are still a living reality, yet restaging history in this way also makes it easier to remember, as despite the dry facts on display, what stands out is the mocking tone of the filmmaker, who is not making fun of history, but how it can be remembered today, as the film is much more entertaining and fun than any description implies, where D’Annunzio is a model for contemporary right-wing populists across Europe and elsewhere.  Nearly ten years in the making, Bezinović draws from a treasure trove of 10,000 archival photographs while also using ordinary citizens from town to restage those same images, starting in the present, showing historical pictures of demolished bridges and buildings, and then showing those same sites in Rijeka today, a port city on Kvarner Bay in the northern Adriatic Sea, with plenty of cars and pedestrian traffic buzzing by.  Yet it’s the tongue-in-cheek narration that stands out, continually conveying a message where reviving interest in the city’s history is an essential message, as it makes us pause and take notice, reminding us this has happened before, so maybe we should pay attention to see how this plays out. 

Employing a hybrid, experimental format and satiric restaging technique used in Radu Jude’s I Don't Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians (Îmi este indiferent daca în istorie vom intra ca barbari) (2018), this is a performative historiography that reconfigures memory through reenactment, documentary observation, archival reappropriation, and collective performances in which contemporary residents of Rijeka restage the historical events.  Focusing on the 1919–1921 occupation of the city of Rijeka/Fiume by the Italian writer and political rabble rouser Gabriele D’Annunzio, who ruled without being elected, the film critically examines the tactics of performance, manipulation, and propaganda employed during the siege, as D’Annunzio was one of the biggest masters of ghastly political showmanship of his time that would ultimately lead to Mussolini, using political theater as a staged reality where the power of pageantry is showcased through a masquerade of images, gestures, and myth as much as through force, exposing the constructed and contingent nature of historical narratives by fragmenting identity, transforming the city into a living memoryscape, FIUME O MORTE! Clip YouTube (1:29). Reflecting on the persistence of extremist ideologies in contemporary society, this is skillfully achieved through participatory performances involving those who live in the city today, as history and memory emerge, skillfully and cohesively edited together by Hrvoslava Brkusic.  At the same time, the film articulates a critical stance towards militarism, political spectacle, and nationalist imagery, positioning memory as a site of communal engagement and critical confrontation with both the past and the present, subversively diagnosing the legacy of fascism.  Winner of the 1st place Tiger Award and Fipresci Prize at the 2025 International Film Festival of Rotterdam, this is the most-watched film in the sixteen years of existence of Rijeka’s 300-seat arthouse Art-kino Theater, and the most-watched documentary in Croatia of all time.

The end of WWI transformed Rijeka/Fiume into a politically contested terrain, where at the time the Rječina River divided it from Sušak, an adjacent town with a predominantly Croatian population which has now been united into one larger city.  Entering the city in a caravan of trucks carrying guns, ammunition, supplies, and soldiers, the so-called legionnaires, D’Annunzio wanted to annex the city for Italy in defiance of his own government, dissatisfied with the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference which proposed handing over the city to the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia), angered by what he considered to be the surrender of an Italian city.  Italy had not, however, made any demands on Rijeka/Fiume, but had instead forgone it in favor of Croatia, leading to a transitory period, the rule of D’Annunzio, where the Italian Regency of Carnaro was a self-proclaimed independent state, as they were successful in seizing control of the city and forced the withdrawal of the Allied occupying forces.  The Italian government opposed this and attempted to pressure D'Annunzio into withdrawing by initiating a blockade of Fiume.  When Italy sought a referendum in Fiume on D’Annunzio’s government, he first agreed but, realizing the vote was against him, sent in the troops to disrupt the vote and nullify the result.  Is anyone in America paying attention?   The song Giovinezza (Youth) is frequently performed, a piece sung by D’Annunzio’s legionnaires during the occupation and later adopted as the anthem of Mussolini’s Italian National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista), anthem of the PNF (1924 lyrics, two verses only) YouTube (2:29).  In what was a dry run for fascism, developing in the early stages, D’Annunzio was never formally a member of the fascist movement, though virtually the entire ritual of fascism was invented by him during his occupation of Fiume where he popularized the black shirts (the Arditi), the Roman/fascist salute, the cries of “Eia, eia, eia! Alala!” taken from Achilles’ cry in The Iliad, and the balcony speeches featuring flamboyant rhetoric engaging with a frenzied crowd, all of which later became symbolic pillars of fascism.  

Later ruling with similar charismatic flamboyance, Mussolini was impressed, adapting many of the same strategies, from D’Annunzio’s authoritarian interventions like censorship and violent repression, to the regulation of public life, including the prohibition of the Rijeka Carnival, strikes, and unauthorized public gatherings, while also having his hand in the promulgation of ambitious charters and the entire choreography of uniformed street parades and ceremonies.  Yet while amassing his authoritarian power, D’Annunzio also personally enjoyed cocaine and lavishly eccentric parties, which the Italians reduce to avant-gardism and an eccentric personality, always considering him a great poet, completely overlooking the violent impact of his fascist rule.  While he’s the star of the show, the protagonist in every sense of the word, and a worshipped celebrity, the film is really about the city of Rijeka, the city’s historically fluid and multi-layered identity, and how it survived this occupation, where over the end credits we see the cast celebrating the lively Carnival together after the shooting ends.  In embodying this more complex plurality, the filmmaker subverts the exclusive and homogenizing nationalist agenda advocated by D’Annunzio himself, who described the non-Italian residents of the city as “Slavic bastards” and “filthy Croats,” destroying their buildings in a hate-based agenda aimed at a radical Italianization of the city.  A true “essay film,” Bezinović foregrounds the instability and performative construction of historical identity, while at the same time reveals how interpretations that focus exclusively on the aesthetic or eccentric dimensions of D’Annunzio’s occupation ultimately lead only to confusion, obscuring its darker sides of violence, repression, the dangers of political idolatry, and especially its protofascist tendencies, foreshadowing the many other authoritarians who are yet to come, where we are reminded that billionaire Elon Musk performed the Roman/fascist salute at the second inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump.   

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.