“Two Prosecutors”: Sergei Loznitsa Examines the Terror Machine Past and Present

In Sergei Loznitsa’s latest feature Two Prosecutors, which premiered in competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, history does not just repeat itself — it haunts, accuses, condemns, and is a warning for the present. Set in 1937 at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, the film dives into the machinery of injustice, weaving fiction with fragments of memory, ideology, and human tragedy. Loznitsa, long revered for his unflinching documentaries, here delivers a stark and riveting narrative adaptation of a largely forgotten short story by Gulag survivor Georgi Demidov.

“This is not a film about the past,” said Loznitsa at the film’s Cannes press conference. “It is a film about now.”

A Story Buried and Resurrected

The origins of Two Prosecutors are steeped in silence and censorship. Demidov wrote the story in 1968, more than a decade after enduring 14 years in the Soviet Gulag. But the KGB seized his manuscript and buried it in archives until the 1990s. It wasn’t published until 2008, forty years after it was written.

“I collect Gulag memoirs and stories,” Loznitsa explained. “I read Demidov’s work in 2010, and it stayed with me. When the opportunity came in 2020, I knew I had to make this film.”

Duality and Irony: The Number “Two”

From the title to the structure, Two Prosecutors is a film of dualities. “Everything in the film comes in twos,” said Loznitsa. “Two prosecutors. Two arrests. Two executions. One sends the other to death, not knowing what he is doing. One is grotesque, the other idealistic. It’s a tragedy of mirrors.”

Veteran actor Alexander Filippenko embodies this dualism, playing both Mr. Stipniak — a weathered, weary official — and a bizarre, wooden-legged man in a train scene lifted from Gogol’s Dead Souls. “I didn’t decide this,” Loznitsa noted. “As Picasso said: I do not seek, I find.”

Filippenko, visibly moved, said: “I am infinitely grateful. This was a role where I had to act without acting — to express something tragic and farcical at the same time. It is the genre I love most: tragifarce.”

Seeing Through the Eyes of the Past

The film’s protagonist, played by Alexander Kuznetsov, is a young Soviet prosecutor whose zealous commitment to duty leads him into moral catastrophe. Critics have described the character as naive — a label Loznitsa resists.

“We see him now and think he’s blind,” the director said. “But we see him through the lens of history. He didn’t have the knowledge we have. It’s easy to judge, but harder to understand.”

Kuznetsov, who has since left Russia due to political convictions, reflected: “As a Russian, these traumas are in my DNA. I didn’t need to study the era — I feel it. The betrayal, the silence, the disgust — it’s all still here.”

Fiction and Documentary: A Thin Line

Known for documentaries like Babi Yar. Context and Mr. Landsbergis, Loznitsa was asked how this narrative feature differs from his past work.

“Only in budget,” he answered dryly. “Otherwise, it’s the same: I observe, I reveal, and I ask the audience to decide what they will do.”

Indeed, Two Prosecutors doesn’t moralize. It depicts a system that eats its own and leaves the viewer with an urgent question: Would we do any better?

Echoes of Arendt, Shades of Today

The Two Prosecutors is full of visual symbolism and the totalitarian aesthetic, particularly the recurring color red.

“The red door is no accident,” Loznitsa said firmly. “It’s the only color in the film. Everything else is uniform, sanitized, procedural. But that red… it’s the stain. It’s the mark of violence that the system tries to hide. And it always bleeds through.”

The film’s unblinking portrayal of bureaucratic complicity — long takes, motionless cameras, flat dialogue — echoed Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the banality of evil. When asked about that influence, Loznitsa nodded: “Arendt understood that horror is not always loud. It’s quiet. It happens in silence, in paperwork, in compliance.”

He added, “These men weren’t monsters. That’s the most frightening thing. They were polite. Educated. Methodical. One signs the death orders, the other objects — but neither steps outside the system. And the machine keeps running.”

Regarding possible references to today’s political climate, Loznitsa stated: “1937 is not over, it’s not in the past. It’s here. It just wears different clothes now — maybe a different flag, a different language. But the logic is the same: eliminate dissent, erase responsibility, normalize terror.”

Cinema as Moral Memory

Two Prosecutors is more than a historical drama — it’s a cinematic act of remembrance and warning. As Filippenko eloquently put it: “In 50 years, people will look at us and say we were naive. The question is: what will we have done with our time?”

Sergei Loznitsa’s powerful new film doesn’t just document injustice—it interrogates the very ease with which societies abandon their conscience. In a world again teetering toward authoritarianism, Two Prosecutors stands as both a mirror and a memorial.