Dva prokurora / Two Prosecutors

Sergei Loznitsa: Два прокурора / Dva prokurora / Two Prosecutors (FR/DE/NL/LV/RO/LT 2025). Prosecutor Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov) enters the dungeons.

Два прокурора / Zwei Staatsanwälte.

France, Germany, Netherlands, Latvia, Romania, Lithuania, Ukraine

2025

Director: Sergei Loznitsa

Starring: Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Aleksandr Filippenko, Anatoliy Belyy, Andris Keišs, Vytautas Kaniušonis

Song: "Pesni o Vstrechnom" / "Song of the Counterplan" ("Nas utro vstrechaet prokhladoi...") comp. Dmitri Shostakovich, lyr. Boris Kornilov. From Vstrechnyi / Counterplan (SU 1932), D: Friedrich Ermler & Sergei Yutkevich. Listen on YouTube: "Pesni o Vstrechnom" / "Nas utro vstrechaet prokhladoi...". The poet Boris Kornilov was arrested on 27 Nov 1937 on charges of participating in an anti-Soviet, Trotskyist organization, and executed on 20 Feb 1938. Songs with Kornilov lyrics were thereafter attributed as "folk lyrics". The poet was posthumously rehabilitated on 5 Jan 1957 "due to lack of evidence of a crime".

    Languages: Russian, Ukrainian

    Distributor: Edge Entertainment, subtitles: English.

    117 min

    Love & Anarchy 38th Helsinki International Film Festival (HIFF)

    Viewed at Bio Rex Lasipalatsi, Helsinki, Sun 21.9.2025 at 13.15–15.12 

Justus Pitkänen (HIFF 2025): "In a dry and darkly humorous depiction of idealism in the midst of Stalin’s Great Terror, a young prosecutor and an imprisoned Bolshevik meet."

"In his fifth fictional feature, Ukrainian master Sergei Loznitsa portrays Stalin’s purges. Based on Georgi Demidov’s novel, the film follows newly graduated prosecutor Kornyev as he goes to meet a prisoner in the midst of the Great Terror. The Bolshevik, beaten to half-dead, and the young idealist both share faith in the Communist system. Kornyev must report the abuses to state prosecutor Vyshinsky. An invalid Bolshevik storyteller on a train also clings to his belief in the revolution. Yet those in power see through the flimsy veil of appearances. In a chilling way, the audience comes to share their sense of humour."

"Loznitsa is known for his documentaries, in which archival footage has revealed truths about, for example, Stalin’s show trials (The Trial, 2018). The same keen eye is present in Two Prosecutors’ sparse, slow-paced scenes. The camera remains still, drawing images both revolting and poetic: the marks of torture, a burning heap of unanswered pleas for help, and citizens sleepwalking through the Palace of Justice."

"This chilly depiction of Stalinism is a confident statement, much like the director’s public interventions. At the film’s premiere in Cannes, Loznitsa remarked on the emerging kinship between Putin’s Russia and Trump’s United States." Justus Pitkänen (translated by Kati Ilomäki)

"Sergei Loznitsan pikimustassa uutuudessa nuoren syyttäjän ja vangitun bolsevikin kohtaaminen keskellä Stalinin vainoja piirtää esiin idealismin kalterit ja sortojärjestelmän synkän komedian."

"Ukrainalaismestari Sergei Loznitsa kuvaa viidennessä pitkässä fiktiossaan Stalinin vainoja. Georgi Demidovin pienoisromaaniin perustuvassa elokuvassa vastavalmistunut syyttäjä Kornyev menee tapaamaan vankia keskellä suurta puhdistusta. Henkihieveriin hakattu bolsevikki ja nuori idealisti jakavat uskon kommunistiseen järjestelmään. Kornyevin täytyy lähteä kertomaan väärinkäytöksistä valtionsyyttäjä Vyšinskille. Myös junassa tarinoivaan bolsevikki-invalidiin on iskostettu usko vallankumoukseen. Valtaapitävät näkevät kuitenkin koko ajan ohuiden verhojen läpi kulissien taakse. Katsoja jakaa kylmäävällä tavalla heidän huumorintajunsa."

"Loznitsa tunnetaan dokumenteista, joissa arkistomateriaali on näyttänyt totuuksia esimerkiksi Stalinin näytösoikeudenkäynneistä (The Trial, 2018). Samaa tarkkanäköisyyttä on Two Prosecutorsin vähissä, hitaissa kohtauksissa. Kamera pysyy paikallaan ja piirtää inhottavia ja runollisia näkyjä: kidutuksen jäljet, palavan avunpyyntöjen röykkiön ja oikeuspalatsissa unissakävelevät kansalaiset."

"Viileä stalinismin kuvaus on varmaotteinen puheenvuoro, jollaisista ohjaaja on tullut tunnetuksi myös julkilausumissaan. Elokuvan ensi-illassa Cannesissa Loznitsa huomautti putinistisen Venäjän ja Trumpin Yhdysvaltojen orastavasta sukulaisuudesta." Justus Pitkänen

AA: Sergei Loznitsa's Two Prosecutors is one of the best films that I have seen about Stalin's terror. I would have to go back to Costa-Gavras's L'Aveu to meet its match.

Stalin is the greatest mystery of the 20th century. During the Revolution, he was invisible. After Lenin's death he started to do away with all who knew him, starting with Trotsky, hunting him to death even in exile. Almost all of the Old Guard, almost all who had principles, were executed, usually in a most humiliating process. As a sidenote, the Finnish Communist Party was established after the Civil War in exile. Stalin had almost all Finnish communists executed.

The oprichnina had existed since Ivan the Terrible, and the Bolsheviks had learned to know its torture chambers during the last decades of Imperial Russia. Now Stalin took over. After Stalin's death, the oprichnina was not abolished, but its power was diminished. Until came Putin, for the first time the leader of Russia himself an oprichnik. No longer dual power.

I love Loznitsa's documentary films but have been less impressed by his fiction. The darkness is impenetrable, and I fail to see transcendence.

The darkness is even blacker in Two Prosecutors, yet I like the portraits Loznitsa paints of his protagonists. They struggle in the devilish grip of the Terror, but there is the indomitable Old Bolshevik Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko) being crushed in the torture chambers of Bryansk, yet his spirit will never die. There is the principled Young Bolshevik, the protagonist, prosecutor Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov) who has a hard time believing Stepniak - that there is a systematic Fascist counter-revolutionary purge of the best people of the country, to be replaced with careerists, sycophants and ignorant charlatans. The Ukrainian Stepniak has survived similar torture in the hands of kulaks, yet he has been defamed to be an "agent of Petlyura". The ultimate insult is making Bolsheviks sign false confessions against themselves and others by starvation, torture and harassment of families. Stepniak's inner organs have been mutilated and every bone in his body has been crushed. But he keeps getting even more obstinate.

Kornev travels to meet the Procurator General Andrei Vyshinsky (Anatoli Beliy) (the other prosecutor of the film's title) in Moscow to make a report and gets authorization for a full investigation. But upon return into Bryansk he is invited into a black car. He realizes that he is already in the hands of NKVD. From a colleague of Vyshinsky he now turns into a kohtalotoveri / Schicksalsgenosse / a man who gets to share the fate of Stepniak.