Still: Two Prosecutors - Sergei Loznitsa

Sergei Loznitsa is back in the main competition in Cannes with his new feature, Two Prosecutors. The film is adapted from a story by Georgy Demidov (1908-1987), a Russian scientist who spent 14 years in the Gulag and whose work is only really being discovered today after years of suppression. It’s Loznitsa’s first drama in a while too, following on from a string of high-profile documentaries (The Invasion, The Kiev Trial, The Natural History of Destruction) that have all played at major festivals.

The story, set in 1937 at the height of the Stalin terror, is split in two chapters. In the first, idealistic young local prosecutor Alexander Kornyev (played by Aleksandr Kuznetsov) encounters a man falsely imprisoned in the catacombs of the prison in Bryansk. The second chapter follows Kornyev’s Kafkaesque misadventures as he travels to Moscow to meet the State Prosecutor, Vyshinsky. En route, he quickly discovers that normal conceptions of guilt and innocence have been turned on their head.

“It’s not really like a ‘return’ [to fiction] because, in order to return, one needs to leave,” the director disputes the idea that he ever quit drama. The new movie is more of a “natural continuation.”

Loznitsa also suggests that Two Prosecutors “is a development” of the story he told in his 2018 documentary The Trial, about a 1930 show trial in Moscow.

“In fact, my initial intention was to start Two Prosecutors with the last statements of the accused from the trial and I wanted to finish the film with Vyshinsky’s speech from the trial of Bukharin.”

‘Two Prosecutors’ author Demidov studied as a scientist under Lev Landau, the brilliant Nobel prize winning physicist whose experiences in the Stalin era formed the backdrop to Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s epic, multidisciplinary project Dau. This encompassed films, installations and books. Loznitsa considers Khrzhanovsky's work valuable and argues that:

“the 1930s has really not been properly represented in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian cinema - and yet this is perhaps the biggest tragedy that happened in the territory that used to be called the Russian empire. It is exactly this lack of reflection that causes history to repeat itself - and we see now how rapidly contemporary Russia is moving toward Stalinism.”

Stalinism is clearly back "in vogue" in the Russian Federation. The director talks darkly of how monuments to Stalin are now being built throughout the country and in the recently annexed Ukrainian territories.  

“What makes Demidov’s work so distinct from all the other memoirs written at that time is that he was describing the whole system as a scientist…he pinpoints the fundamental errors people living at that time made, and which lead to such fatal consequences.”

Loznitsa and his team have recreated 1930s Russia in meticulous detail. The main location was a former prison in Riga (Latvia) built in 1905 during the Russian Empire. They very deliberately shot with a motionless camera and used a desaturated palette, stripping out primary colours, “all colours of life.”

Some of the costumes were sewn from vintage 1930s fabrics. It helped, too, that Riga has plenty of “remnants of the Soviet architecture.”

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the film ends in an abrupt but utterly chilling fashion. “In the book, the character is put on trial. He confesses his guilt and dies in the camp. [But] I decided to end where I did because everything that follows is kind of obvious,” Loznitsa explains the elliptical finale.

Atoms & Void, the production company run by the Ukrainian filmmaker with his associate, Dutch producer and casting director Maria Choustova, is based in the Hague. Dutch make-up artist Marly van de Wardt and sound recordist Taco Drijfhout together with their assistants formed part of the international crew on the set of Two Prosecutors. Dutch composer Christiaan Verbeek, who previously collaborated with Loznitsa on his 2022 Cannes documentary The Natural History of Destruction composed the film's music. The final sound mix was carried out at Posta Studio in Amsterdam under the supervision of re-recording mixer Vincent Sinceretti, who has worked on a number of Loznitsa's fiction and documentary projects.

Two Prosecutors is produced by SBS Productions (FR) in co-production with Atoms & Void (NL), Looks Filmproduktionen (DE) Avanpost Media (RO), White Picture (LV) and Studio Uljana Kim (LT). Sales are handled by SBS International and Coproduction Office. It is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund.