In the organizer's words:

In his documentaries and feature films, the internationally award-winning director Sergei Loznitsa deals intensively with sometimes oppressive stories about the history of the Soviet Union. The feature film Two Prosecutors is based on a novel by Georgi Demidov, who grew up in Kharkiv, was arrested in 1938 and spent 14 years in the Gulag. He wrote the novel in 1969 and its publication was unthinkable. His work was only discovered in the course of perestroika.

About the film: It is 1937, the height of the Stalinist terror, when the local public prosecutor Kornev, a committed young communist who still thinks in terms of law and justice, receives a letter asking him to take on the case of a prisoner. What he then learns is a conspiracy at the highest level, which he reports to Moscow.

Director Loznitsa develops this into a highly concentrated chamber play with outstanding actors who explore the various strategies of exercising power, cynicism and subservience in subtle nuances.

Sergei Loznitsa on adapting the novel for the film:
"Although I tried to follow Demidov's text as closely as possible when writing the screenplay, it was also important to me to place the narrative in a broader philosophical and cultural context. The shadows of Gogol and Kafka constantly hovered before my eyes while I was working on the script (..). I deliberately "invited" Gogol into the movie with Captain Kopeykin (from Dead Souls), then Kafka showed up and snuck in by himself - without any special invitation! Two Prosecutors is a tragedy. But as in any true tragedy, there is always a place for the grotesque and for farce.

And to the question of relevance for today:
"Two Prosecutors is set during Stalin's purges, when the whole country is gripped by fear. I am fascinated by this psychological mechanism - both in the individual and collective psyche - that enables and sustains the existence of a totalitarian society based entirely on terror. Such psychological patterns repeat themselves century after century, generation after generation, and ultimately all totalitarian regimes are in many ways the same.

• Two Prosecutors, feature film, Director: Sergei Loznitsa, F/D/NL/LV/RO/LT 2025, 118 min.
  with Sergei Loznitsa, Thomas Martin, Irina Rastorgueva and others
  Director/Writer: Sergei Loznitsa
  DoP: Oleg Mutu
  Starring: Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, Anatoli Beliy

  Based on the novel of the same name by Georgi Demidov

Price information:

7,50 EUR (Reduced: 5 EUR)