Two Prosecutors

Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa has carved out a career making heavy hitting political dramas and documentaries. His new gritty historical drama, set in 1937, is based on a novella by Georgy Demidov, who was a gulag survivor during Stalin’s Great Purge.

An ambitious young Soviet prosecutor Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznesov) follows up a letter written in blood from prisoner in the ‘Special Block -Cell 84’ (solitary confinement), in Bryansk, Soviet Union. He runs on the misconception that ‘duty calls’ so he pays the prisoner Stepnick (Aleksandr Filipenko) a visit to investigate if he has become a victim of corruption by the NKVD.

The infamous “purges of ’37” were conducted by NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), part of the Interior Ministry includes the Secret Police. A time of heightened paranoia during Stalin’s regime, all ‘potential’ rivals and enemies were culled.

Loznitsa meticulously investigates this era in his adaptation, working closely with his cinematographer Oleg Mutu. Set in the prison city of Bryansk, it conveys the power of the governmental run institutions and the complex levels of hierarchy.

The film opens and closes around the prison compound, with long bleak shots that convey its labyrinth-like structure, along grim corridors, stairways, and through solid steel doors, all operated by hard-faced guards headed by the appointed Governor, who orchestrates the daily running of the prison from a well concealed office.

Loznitsa has constructed a slow-paced drama; a waiting game for Kornyev, who sits blankly on trains where he meets estranged people who taunt him with menacing political wisecracks about Stalin, including a wonderful performance by the garrulous pegleg (an uncanny double role for Aleksandr Filipenko) who bears a sinister demeanour.

Kornyev a young man of few words, less the wise with his angelic good looks and caved in boxer nose; seeks out a meeting with Andrey Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy) the Procurator General of the Soviet Union. In a monumental government building in the heart of the city, Kornyev who believes he is doing his job, meets his maker and falls victim to the state.

Two Prosecutors had its world premiere in main competition at the 78^th Cannes Film Festival, 2025 and won the Francois Chalais Prize.

Flora Georgiou