Two Prosecutors

(France/Germany/Netherlands/Latvia/Romania/Lithuania/2025—directed by Sergei Loznitsa)

In 1937, at the nightmarish height of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge, an idealistic Soviet state lawyer (Alexander Kuznetsov) receives a note written in blood and smuggled out of a prisoner’s cell. The innocent young lawyer pushes past the prison's leery authorities to interview the note’s author: an elderly, broken-down Bolshevik (Aleksandr Filippenko) who has a powerful story to tell. The eager attorney, determined to expose to “higher authorities” the miscarriages of justice that befell the prisoner, soon finds the eye of the state turned on him instead, as an ever-tightening net encircles his investigation. Set at the paranoid peak of Stalin’s police state, director Sergei Loznitsa’s triumph is a chilling, Kafkaesque thriller about the impunity of power and the matter-of-fact horrors of fascism. Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals. In Russian with English subtitles. (118 min.)

“Superb! An extraordinary, meticulously constructed steel trap of a movie.” -Justin Chang, The New Yorker