15/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: Sergei Loznitsa returns to fiction with a relentless, masterfully staged tale of communist justice at the height of Stalinist terror

"These are troubled times, as I'm sure you're aware." It is into a world of constrained and obstinate patience, of surreptitious glances, of paranoid suspicions, of situations weighed with infinite caution and sharp bureaucratic double-speak, a perilous game of cat and mouse that Sergei Loznitsa propels us, with the immense talent we know him for, with Two Prosecutors [+see also:
trailer
film profile], unveiled in competition at the 78th Cannes Festival. Returning to fiction, the Ukrainian filmmaker plunges back into 1937, methodically and artfully dissecting the dark heart of Stalinist totalitarianism in the midst of a frenzy of purges and chains, creating a general atmosphere of fear and silence, and even cruel satisfaction on the part of the executioners. It's a deadly atmosphere that is reminiscent of dictatorships of all eras, including the present day...

“You won't be protected from the risk of infection”, “Do you know where your predecessor is?” In office for three months, young prosecutor Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov) is not intimidated by the innuendo of the Bryansk prison governor, who is trying every means to prevent him from visiting prisoner Stepniak (Alexander Filippenko) in cell 84 of block 5, who has managed to get a message (“I have vital information”) outside the walls of the ultra-secure compound (during the film's extraordinary prologue). But however tenacious he may be, Kornev still has no idea how far his quest for the truth will take him into the special block reserved for counter-revolutionaries. By having the doors opened, he also puts himself in great danger, and a race against time begins that will take him all the way to Moscow to the office of the Prosecutor General Vishynsky (Anatoly Beliy)...

Through his perfectly sketched characters and remarkable atmospheric rendering (enhanced by the fantastic frames of Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu) Sergei Loznitsa makes an excellent film, condensed and intense in its chiselled tempo. Taking all the time he needs to study the expressions on the faces, the suggestions in the words, the heavy prison climate, the hushed, almost Kafkaesque world of the centre of power, while injecting a modicum of suspense and (very) dark humour into the tribulations of his idealistic hero on the lookout, already feeling or imagining the breath of the NKVD (now FSB) on his neck, the director delivers a pitiless picture (based on a screenplay inspired by a novella by Georgi Demidov, a physicist purged under Stalin and sent to the Gulag), a striking message denouncing a corrupt Saturnian system that devours its own children, and a cinematic work of the highest order.

Two Prosecutors was produced by SBS Productions (France) with Avanpost Media (Romania), Looks Filmproduktionen (Germany), Atoms & Void (Netherlands), White Picture (Latvia) and Studio Uljana Kim (Lithuania). Coproduction Office will handle international sales.

(Translated from French)