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-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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