Two Prosecutors

Just 20 years after the revolution that rippled across the globe and still reverberates today, Two Prosecutors opens inside a men’s prison in the town of Bryansk, 400 kilometres from Moscow. It’s 1937, the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, and inside a dank cell, an old man is tasked with the burning letters of interned prisoners, each asserting that their confessions to the NKVD (the USSR’s secret service) were forced. One such letter, written in blood and addressed to the local Prosecutor’s Office, is smuggled out. Its author, Stepiak (Alexander Filippenko, who left Russia after the illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022), is an old Bolshevik, who played a role in building the regime that has now imprisoned him. Soon after, a recent graduate called Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov, who was born in Ukraine and left Russia ​​as an act of protest against the ongoing war) arrives to investigate. This meeting is not their first encounter — and the rest is history.

Flanked by Oleg Mutu’s Academy-ratio cinematography, the latest from Sergei Loznitsa (Maïdan, TIFF ’14; Donbass, TIFF ’18; The Trial, TIFF ’18; State Funeral, TIFF ’19) is based on a novella by political activist Georgy Demidov. Heart-rending and acute, this totalitarian nightmare is a portrait of the not-so-distant past echoing the clamours of propaganda that, to this day, glorify a regime in which at least 700,000 citizens were purged. Simultaneously, it acts as a powerful metaphor for the regime’s heirs who continue to torment its citizens as well as their unfortunate neighbours.

DOROTA LECH