Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
The Ukrainian director’s ‘Two Prosecutors’ depicts a 1937 fight for justice but, he says, its relevance to today is all too clear
Sergei Loznitsa’s new film Two Prosecutors took him only a month to write, he says, but two years to finance. “People asked me, ‘Why do you want to make a film about Stalinist times? That’s far back in the past, it’s no longer interesting.’” The Ukrainian director gives a little ironic chuckle at the thought of financiers not getting why a film about social control and the repression of truth would be relevant today — not just in a Russian but in a global context.
In 2018, Loznitsa made a documentary, The Trial, using archive footage from the USSR’s 1930s show trials — propaganda spectacles that saw countless defendants, invariably devoted Communist party members, eagerly accusing themselves of imaginary crimes against the nation. Now Two Prosecutors gives a fictional account of the state machinery behind such confessions. Set in 1937, it follows Kornyev, an idealistic young state prosecutor who meets a prisoner who’s lodged a complaint against his detention; believing the man has been the victim of counter-revolutionary forces, Kornyev takes the case to the higher authorities, whose justice and wisdom he utterly believes in. It proves a reckless decision.
On a visit to London, speaking in Russian via an interpreter, Loznitsa, 61, explains the background to his film. Two Prosecutors is based on a story written in 1969 by Georgi Demidov, a Russian physicist who was arrested in Kharkiv in 1938 and spent 14 years as a prisoner in the gulag system. “Demidov’s daughter obtained these manuscripts from the KGB archives in the early 1990s, and she had great difficulty getting them,” Loznitsa says. “I’m convinced that those archives contain many, many great works of literature that we have no idea about. And I’m sure they have a film archive as well, containing amazing stuff that we can’t get our hands on.”
Alexander Kuznetsov as Kornyev in ‘Two Prosecutors’
He explains what drew him to Demidov. “The reason why I chose him, rather than other authors that wrote about their experience of the gulag, is that he actually tried to construct a model — to describe the whole repressive system. His three stories about the year 1937 [including ‘Two Prosecutors’] contain descriptions of the mistakes people made that led to them ending up in the gulag.”
By “mistakes”, Loznitsa means not real transgressions against the state, but the unconscious errors involved in crossing some intangible line that they could never have suspected was there. “The greatest mistake people made,” he says, “was believing that the Soviet system was correct and just. Most people who knew they had committed no crime were convinced that they had been arrested by mistake and would be freed after a few days. They never expected that they would be beaten and tortured, that prosecutors would demand confessions. They had no idea what country they were living in.”
The merciless realism of Two Prosecutors comes partly from the fact that much of it was shot in the claustrophobic confines of a real prison in Riga, Latvia — built in 1905 and only shut down earlier this century for not meeting present-day humanitarian standards. The idea of the prison as a maze — one not bounded by its literal walls, but extending throughout Russian society — is a familiar Loznitsa theme. He previously explored it in 2017’s A Gentle Creature, about a woman in present-day Russia trying to visit her interned husband and finding that a prison actually begins well outside its gates.
Loznitsa has a theory about the legacy of the Stalin era. “Millions of people passed through the gulag system and emerged knowing criminal laws, the criminal lexicon and criminal behaviour. So prison culture extended to the whole of society. Nowadays Russia is a country dominated by the culture of criminals.”
Is that an accidental effect of history, or does Loznitsa see such a “criminalising” of society as something used by the state as a means of control? Absolutely the latter, he says. “It is the simplest form of social control, but also the least efficient in terms of people’s wellbeing. Look what it led to. Such a society is not able to create anything, to build anything that is complex. This enormous country that used to be able to build rockets and Sputniks is not able to build a normal plane.”
From the start of this century, Loznitsa has been an exhaustive investigator of Russian and Soviet history, and the 20th century more broadly. His five fiction films include the haunting second world war drama In the Fog(2012) and Donbass (2018), an abrasive, panoramic black comedy about the conflicts preceding Putin’s full-scale assault on Ukraine. He is also an indefatigable documentarist, whether filming events himself (Maidan, on the Kyiv protests of 2013-14) or in complex assemblages of archive footage, including accounts of the Allied bombing of Germany and the Babi Yar massacre of 1941. He is currently making another archive film, a picture of the early 1970s Soviet Union, from material shot at the time by Italian filmmakers. “The archive called me and said, ‘Sergei, we only know one person who could make a film from 65 hours of Super-16 footage.’”
Born in Belarus in 1964 but raised in Kyiv, Loznitsa studied mathematics and engineering, then worked as a scientist in cybernetics before he turned to film. From his youth in the Soviet era, he remembers growing up in an atmosphere of cautious folk wisdom, and people telling him, “‘If you know a lot, you will become an old person very soon.’ I understand that the adults who knew where they were living were protecting me from too much knowledge.”
Those people certainly did not impede Loznitsa’s acquisition of learning. At moments, our interview has touches of the seminar, as he discourses on the early days of the Bolsheviks, or cites assorted historians, neuroscientists and zoologists. When I ask about the brilliant lead of Two Prosecutors, Alexander Kuznetsov, he quotes Dostoevsky. The young Crimean-born actor is known for playing action-man or tearaway roles, notably in the Russian black comedy hit Why Don’t You Just Die!What made Loznitsa think of casting him as a gentle, thoughtful, serious-minded innocent? He replies by slightly altering a line from The Brothers Karamazov: “‘The Russian man is very broad. It wouldn’t hurt to narrow him down a bit.’” He laughs. “So I narrowed him down. It’s a fantastic performance.”
These days based in Berlin and Vilnius, Loznitsa has been a controversial figure in Ukraine since the invasion began. The Ukrainian Film Academy expelled him in part for opposing a boycott of Russian films; he argued that would silence filmmakers opposed to Putin. He has not been in Ukraine since 2021: he explains that, as a holder of a Ukrainian passport, he would not be allowed to leave the country if he entered.
His films sometimes contain material that might not be popular with Ukrainian viewers. In 2024, he made The Invasion, a documentary depicting everyday life in that country since the start of the war (by necessity, filmed in his absence). It contains a sequence showing the pulping of books in the Russian language, Dostoevsky included; there is no overt commentary, but the sequence is implicitly critical of such actions. The film, he notes, has never been shown in Ukraine. “I’m not the person they want to see on the front of their newspaper.” But, he adds, “I don’t have any issues with Ukrainian actors or filmmakers.”
Loznitsa’s public pronouncements, in interviews and lectures, have tended to be pessimistic, but he still believes in the possibility of culture making a difference to the state of the world. “Culture always works to subdue aggression. I believe that the current war can be stopped. But our consciousness always lags behind — we only understand things with hindsight.”
‘Two Prosecutors’ is in UK cinemas from March 27
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Andy Weir’s “Project Hail Mary,”published in 2021, is a story about humanity’s last-ditch attempt to save Earth from “astrophage,” a fictional, star-eating algae that has infected our sun. The book chronicles the journey of scientist-turned-science-teacher Ryland Grace, who wakes up on a spaceship and ultimately befriends Rocky, an alien from a planet called Erid that is completely unlike Earth but which faces the same threat.
On Friday, a film of the same name releases in theaters; it’s the second book by Mr. Weir to have been adapted for the big screen, following “The Martian” in 2015. The new movie, which stars Ryan Gosling as Dr. Grace, only flicks at the deep dive Mr. Weir took into physics, biology, rocket science and more to bring aliens and interstellar space travel to life.
“I try to be scientifically accurate,” Mr. Weir, the child of a physicist and an engineer, said to a room full of scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., last month. “That’s my whole shtick.”
In a subsequent interview, the writer and newly minted film producer talked about the science underlying “Project Hail Mary” and the process of adapting the written word into a feature film. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
How did you come up with the idea for the book?
I was thinking about what we would do if, with our current morals, beliefs and ideas, we had a mass-conversion fuel. Not in some weird future, but like right now. We could be colonizing the solar system. We could have cities on Mars.
Just to clarify: A mass-conversion fuel is something that stores a huge amount of energy in a relatively tiny amount of mass, like with nuclear power. It’s far more efficient than a fuel that requires combustion, like gasoline.
I was thinking about that, and how to explain how we might get that technology. People could invent the mass-conversion fuel, but that seemed like a MacGuffin. Maybe they find a crashed alien spaceship — but the other technology on that ship would be more interesting. What if we found some alien fuel independent of a ship? But then you use it, and it’s gone. So you have to be able to make more fuel with the fuel itself. What if it absorbs energy and makes more of itself? That sounded a lot like life.
There has to be a reason that fuel ended up on Earth. If you’re a mold or something, you’d need to basically live on the surface of a star to get enough energy to do that. So I made astrophage, which is like an algae. But instead of living in the ocean, it lives on a star and spores out to other stars.
I had my excuse for how astrophage ended up in our solar system, how humans had access to it and how we could reproduce it. But I had to make sure none of it got on our own sun, because that would be catastrophic.
The astrophage would consume too much of the sun’s energy, eventually throwing Earth into another ice age.
And then I realized that was the story. Forget about my city on Mars or the politics between planets — that problem was the story. I just needed a solution that involved an interstellar trip. And I worked from there.
You strove for scientific accuracy when writing “Project Hail Mary.” What was it like adapting that for the big screen?
It’s a matter of space and time. You really have to abbreviate. Sci-fi writers don’t need to explain in so much detail that it enables readers to solve problems. They just need enough to understand the plot.
For the movie, a lot of it was just kind of a “Hey, trust us — hopefully you believe us when we tell you that if you accelerate at 1.5 g for this long, you experience about four years of time while Earth had 13.” The viewers take our word for it.
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Mr. Weir at Comic-Con San Diego last summer.Credit...Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
It sounds like you worked through that math yourself.
I did. I found the equations for the rocket stuff online. That’s how I got that you need two million kilograms of astrophage for a 100,000-kilogram spaceship — although that got scaled up in the movie.
Eridians don’t understand relativity, so I also calculated how to get from Erid to Tau Ceti, the star where Rocky and Dr. Grace meet, without accounting for it. I do calculations wrong by mistake all the time, so I might as well do them on purpose.
I’m proud that the only true violation of physics in the story is something you have to go down to the quantum level to find. Trillions of neutrinos, tiny particles that rarely interact with matter, pass through us every second. But astrophage can store neutrinos using a made-up property I called “super cross-sectionality.” They don’t bother trying to explain this in the film.
Why make Rocky incompatible with an Earthlike environment?
A lot of space opera-style stories are the great era of exploration in the 1700s projected into a science-fiction setting. The Enterprise goes out and visits strange new worlds, like how Marco Polo visited the Orient. When he met people from the Orient, they could be in the same room and breathe the same air and eat the same food, because they were also human. So if you want to evoke that feeling, you make those concessions with the aliens.
But I didn’t want to do that. I mean, shoot, there are things on Earth that have incompatible environments. If you swap the locations of a shark and a camel, they’re both going to die.
I didn’t set out for Rocky to be as alien as possible. What I did was not have any restrictions on my speculative evolution of what this alien is like.
What was that process like?
When I wrote “Project Hail Mary,” it was believed that there was an exoplanet very, very close to a star system called 40-Eridani. (Now it looks like the planet might not actually be there at all.) For the plot, I needed life based on liquid water. So I asked, how can you have liquid water on a planet so close to its star?
The water would boil off unless there was a high atmospheric pressure. Drive up the pressure, and you drive up the boiling point of water. So I knew the planet had to have a thick atmosphere and really hot water.
A star will blast the atmosphere off a planet that’s too close. It helps if the atmosphere is made of heavy molecules, like Venus with its carbon dioxide. For Erid, I decided on ammonia. I also decided that Erid had a magnetic field. Both of those keep the atmosphere from blasting off.
Then I needed life to evolve in that environment. I made Eridian bodies like biospheres, so the oxygen and carbon cycles happen internally. With a thick atmosphere, I doubted sunlight would reach the surface, so there was no point in developing vision.
I ended with an alien comfortable in an environment with water at 210 degrees Celsius — 410 degrees Fahrenheit — and a high-pressure atmosphere made of ammonia. That’s pretty incompatible with Earth.
What role do stories like this, so grounded in science, play in advancing scientific knowledge?
I’ve never bought into the idea that science fiction authors are visionaries. I think sci-fi authors are science dorks with the ability to write books.
The science dorks who actually do the science are the ones changing the world. Anything that a science fiction author thinks of has probably already been thought of by an actual scientist. They just didn’t write a book about it; they wrote an academic paper.
So the difference is that you aren’t confined by the bounds of peer review.
I’m also not confined by the boundaries of physics. When it gets down to it, I can break physical laws. You can’t do that as a physicist.
But scientists come up with the same stuff. They just go through a more rigorous process to prove or disprove, and refine.
Katrina Miller is a science reporter for The Times based in Chicago. She earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago.
What’s Up in Space and Astronomy
Keep track of things going on in our solar system and all around the universe.
Space Traffic Controllers: A small team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has been keeping track of spacecraft orbiting the moon and Mars and raising alerts when it seems that two of them might cross paths.
Asteroid-Smashing NASA Mission: New data about the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, adds evidence that Earth could be defended from future deadly asteroids by diverting their orbits.
When author and journalist Ali Gripper moved to Maroubra in 2011, she was the textbook new arrival, moving south for affordability.
“I was a refugee because I couldn’t afford a nice two-bedroom in Randwick and Coogee,” she says. “I was a single mum. I came over that hill, and suddenly I could afford a decent, solid, two-bedroom
, so it was purely economic for me.”
Fortunately, that financial decision also delivered a brilliant lifestyle. While Gripper’s son took up skateboarding and surfing, she became a “mad-keen” ocean swimmer, a hobby that eventually led to her second book, Saltwater Cure, about the transformative power of the ocean.
She says open-water swimming is “the essence of Sydney life … it’s just the most incredible way to start the day”.
Kids will enjoy Maroubra Skate Park. Photo: Vaida Savickaite
Agent Veronica Perez grew up in Maroubra and says life has long revolved around the one-kilometre stretch of white-sand beach that was dedicated as a National Surfing Reserve in 2006.
“Still today the kids spend their time at the beach, so I think it’s a big part of the culture of Maroubra,” she says, noting that the suburb has plenty to offer young families, including 14 parks and reserves, and eight schools.
The suburb is also a great base for those who work at the Prince of Wales Hospital, UNSW Sydney and the airport.
The idyllic beach sets the pace here, with great surfing and snorkelling spots. Photo: Vaida Savickaite
“A lot of nearby suburbs like Bondi and Coogee can be quite transient,” Perez says. “You get a lot of tourists coming in and out, whereas Maroubra is still very much community-based. For business owners, that means you get to know your clientele, you get your regulars, which is lovely.”
Gripper lives next to Malabar Headland National Park and says it’s that connection to nature that she loves most.
“Sometimes I’ll visit Bondi or Coogee, and it’s like, ‘Whoa! It’s so intense,’” she says. “I like coming back here, and my shoulders just relax as soon as I pull into the driveway.”
The suburb has plenty of casual and upscale eateries to choose from. Photo: Vaida Savickaite
Maranello’s is always crowded; we go there for wood-fired pizza and authentic Italian. Tradewinds is famous for ribs. Barmilano overlooks the beach and is more upmarket – it’s great for when you’re looking for cocktails and a special night out.
Hidden gem of Maroubra
Going for a dip in Mahon Pool, an ocean pool at North Maroubra, is a great way to start the day. In the morning, you get the oldies with their goggles or snorkels, and on a balmy afternoon, you might see families having a swim.
What to do in Maroubra
While the beach is an absolute highlight, if you’re not beach-oriented, then Heffron Park and the recently refurbished Des Renford Leisure Centre have great
. There are two indoor pools, an outdoor pool, a gym, and an outdoor cycling track.
With Heffron Park on the doorstep, you’ll be lucky to see the kids between dawn and dusk when you call this
-designed property home. A 3.4-metre island bench wrapped in a single slab of quartz makes a statement in the open-plan living spaces, which are zoned for living and dining and open to a north-facing back garden.
Calling all budding cricket, tennis and rugby stars: this renovated three-bedder is right across the road from Snape Park, where a multimillion-dollar upgrade is underway. The c1915 semi has built-in wardrobes in every bedroom, a skylit and air-conditioned attic retreat, open-plan living spaces with timber floors and high ceilings, and an island kitchen with Smeg appliances.
