Loznitsa, who is renowned for his work as a documentary maker, has been less successful with his last two fiction films A Gentle Creature (2017) and Donbass (2018), so his fans will be hoping for a return to form with this latest fiction feature based on a background of harsh reality of the Soviet Union in 1937.
The film is based on a book by physicist Georgy Demidov originally written in 1969, who survived the gulag himself, but it was only published in 2009. Loznitsa wrote the script for the story.
Loznitsa said: “Over the past thirty years, I have collected quite a substantial library of books by prisoners of the Gulag, as well as of the Nazi camps. Naturally, when I first heard about the publication of Two Prosecutors, I was fascinated. I read the novella and the story stayed with me…A few years later, I wrote the screenplay. In a country where tens of millions were displaced or went through the Gulag, and tens of millions perished in the camps, starved to death or just died because of unbearable conditions of existence – the memory of these tragic events lives on in almost each and every family. This memory is still haunting us today.”
The story starts in the grim setting of a Soviet prison, thousands of letters written by the falsely accused detainees addressed ironically to Stalin who they do not realise is their oppressor are burned in a prison cell. Against all odds, one of them reaches its destination, and winds up on the desk of the newly appointed idealistic local prosecutor, Alexander Kornev played by Aleksandr Kuznetsov.
Kornev believes in the communist system he serves and he realises that the prisoner is innocent. He insists on meeting the prisoner Stepniak played by Alexander Filippenko, who wrote the note.
Kornev believes Stepniak is a victim of corrupt agents of the secret police, the NKVD. His quest for justice will take him all the way to the office of Vyshynsky the Attorney General in Moscow played by Anatoli Beliy. The story follows both the grim reality of the gulag and the stifling bureaucracy that supported the Stalinist system.
Loznitsa has assembled an impressive lineup of production talent for this outing, starting with cinematographer Oleg Mutu and a score by classical composer Christiaan Verbeek, production design from Jurij Grigorovič and Aldis Meinerts.
Two Prosecutors ( France, Germany, Netherlands, Latvia, Romania, Lithuania )
Directed by Sergei Loznitsa
Cast: Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, Anatoli Beliy, Andris Keišs, Vytautas Kaniušonis
Production: SBS Productions (France)
Coproduction: Looksfilm, Atoms and Void, Looks Film, White Picture (Latvia), Avanpost Media (Romania), Uljana Kim Studio www.lfc.lt (Lithuania), The Match Factory (Germany)
Funding Backers: Centre National du cinéma et de l’image animée / L’aide aux cinémas
du monde / Institut français (France), Netherlands Film Fund
(Netherlands), Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg in association with Arte,
Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Filmförderungsanstalt, Mitteldeutsche
Medienförderung (Germany), Romanian Film Centre (Romania), Riga Film Fund, Investment and Development Agency of Latvia (Latvia), Lithuanian Film Centre (Lithuania)
