Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa returns to the Cannes Film Festival with the gripping Soviet period drama “Two Prosecutors,” marking the first time in nearly a decade that the celebrated filmmaker will compete for the Palme d’Or. The film world premieres in Competition on May 14.
Set in a provincial Soviet town in 1937, at the height of Josef Stalin’s reign of terror, Loznitsa’s latest is a harrowing portrait of one man’s powerlessness when confronting the ruthless machinery of a brutal, capricious state.
It is a story, the director says, that finds chilling echoes in world events today, as Russian strongman Vladimir Putin clamps down on dissent amid his country’s ongoing war in Ukraine, and as U.S. President Donald Trump flaunts his own authoritarian impulses with reckless disregard for the rule of law. “Watching this story from the past, we also recognize the present,” Loznitsa tells Variety.
“It seems that we are returning to the time before the Second World War, and it’s very sad. It’s very regretful,” the director says. “It seems that no lessons have been learned from the events that took place 80, 90 years ago. This is why I’m going back to this subject and showing just a tiny part of this totalitarian regime that seems to be coming back — the shadow of which is looming on the horizon.”
“Two Prosecutors” takes place during the Great Purge orchestrated by Stalin to consolidate his hold on the Communist Party. It follows Alexander Kornyev, a newly appointed prosecutor, who receives an anonymous letter written in blood on a scrap of cardboard. Its mysterious author is a political prisoner who pleads with the young prosecutor to investigate his case.
Despite the efforts of local party apparatchiks to impede his investigation, Kornyev (Aleskandr Kuznetsov) manages to interview the man in prison, where his battered body bears evidence of torture at the hands of the dreaded Soviet secret police, the NKVD. A dedicated Bolshevik brimming with the idealism and integrity of youth, Kornyev sets out in search of justice for the prisoner — a journey that will take him to Moscow and the heart of Stalin’s totalitarian regime.
The film is adapted from a novella by Georgy Demidov, a scientist and political prisoner who spent 14 years in the Soviet gulags, later chronicling his experiences and documenting “the Stalinist machine of repression in the Soviet Union,” according to Loznitsa.
Written in 1969, at a time when even a casual reader would have risked running afoul of Soviet authorities, the unpublished manuscript was seized by the KGB, alongside the rest of Demidov’s works, in 1980. Eight years later, following the author’s death, the lost manuscripts were returned to the Demidov family at the request of his daughter, although “Two Prosecutors” wouldn’t be published until 2009. “It’s a story that waited 40 years [to be told],” says Loznitsa.
“Two Prosecutors” marks the director’s return to fiction filmmaking after a nearly decade-long hiatus, since his black comedy “Donbass” won the prize for best director in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in 2018. It is his third time competing for the Palme d’Or, following his feature debut, the road film “My Joy” (2010), and the riveting Russia-set drama “A Gentle Creature” (2017), with a series of highly regarded documentaries occupying the director in recent years.
“Two Prosecutors” is competing for the Palme d’Or in Cannes.
Courtesy of SBS Productions
Loznitsa, who was born in modern-day Belarus and raised in Kyiv, returns to Cannes one year after screening “The Invasion,” a documentary that chronicles scenes of daily life during the Russian war in Ukraine. The director, who left his homeland more than two decades ago, has seen little in recent world events to bolster his confidence in the end of a conflict that has raged for more than a thousand days, saying, “I’m afraid at the moment, we’re very far away from peace.”
While President Trump has realigned U.S. foreign policy toward Moscow and strengthened ties with America’s erstwhile bête noire in Putin, Loznitsa takes little solace in the prospect of a Trump-brokered peace deal. “The events that unfolded in the past 100 days really surprised many people all over the world. And I think a lot of people were shocked by what’s happening,” he says. “One couldn’t even imagine in a nightmare such a union, such an understanding between two authoritarian leaders.
“One of these leaders represents a country that is hurtling back toward Stalinism — a country that breaches international law, a country that wages wars with its neighbors,” he continues. “And the other leader, who for us represents the country which has always been considered a fortress of democracy, that doesn’t only proclaim the rule of law and human rights, but also a country that fights for human rights.” It is only a matter of time, he fears, before “these two countries will become equal.”
A product of the Cold War, Loznitsa grew up under the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, when the prospect of nuclear annihilation was just a midnight phone call or red button away. Having spent his filmmaking career chronicling mankind’s worst impulses, he has a sobering perspective on the futility of human endeavors and our continued failure to learn from the lessons of the past.
In the final years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Loznitsa worked as a scientist at the Kyiv Institute of Cybernetics, where he specialized in artificial intelligence research. Marking the technology’s extraordinary gains, he again finds himself ruminating on an existential threat to humanity, and on the prospect of extinction.
“We know that once upon a time, dinosaurs walked the planet. Then they disappeared. But then new dinosaurs appeared,” he says. “Life will find different forms. The fundamental flaw is that we assume ourselves as being omnipotent and super powerful. But in fact, from the point of view of nature, we’re very weak. We, as humans, occupy a very tiny place in this enormous universe.”
