Two Prosecutors. 2025. France/Germany/Netherlands/Latvia/Romania/Lithuania. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa. With Alexander Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, Anatoliy Beliy. DCP courtesy Janus Films. In Russian; English subtitles. 118 min.
“A superbly chilling historical drama” (Justin Chang, The New Yorker). In 1937, at the height of Josef Stalin’s Great Purge, an idealistic young prosecutor receives a letter written in blood from a political prisoner protesting his innocence and torture, seemingly the only letter among the thousands written by inmates that has escaped detection and immediate incineration by the prison authorities. The prosecutor takes up the cause of this Old Bolshevik, a former party stalwart who became a target of the secret police (NKVD). His fight for justice, inscribed in chilling detail by Sergei Loznitsa and his brilliant Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu, is a Kafkaesque journey into the bureaucracy of totalitarian terror, from the bowels of a Soviet prison to the labyrinthine corridors of power in Moscow. This story, like so many of Loznitsa’s fiction films, is rooted in brutal truth: a novella by the Soviet physicist Gyorgy Demidov about the 14 years he spent in a Siberian gulag; written in 1969 and confiscated in 1980, the manuscript would not see the light of day until 2009, some 22 years after his death.