Two Prosecutors

The Soviet Union, 1937. In a prison cell, letters from detainees are being burned. One survives and reaches Kornev, a young prosecutor. It describes torture. Kornev believes in the party and in the law and decides to take the matter to Moscow. Getting an appointment, getting through a door and being heard take days. The subject is not terror but bureaucracy itself. Almost no violence is shown; instead there are corridors, waiting rooms, signatures and stamps. The system Kornev believes in is courteous to him throughout, and that is precisely what makes it frightening. The form is extremely still: fixed camera, long takes, empty corridors, the repeated sound of doors. Sergei Loznitsa carries the eye from his documentary work into this. The source is Georgy Demidov's story of the same name. Demidov was a physicist who spent fourteen years in the camps and whose writing went unpublished for years; his manuscripts were confiscated and surfaced only after his death. This is Loznitsa's first scripted film since Donbass in 2018 and it played in the main competition at Cannes in 2025, where it won the François Chalais prize. Aleksandr Kuznetsov plays Kornev. Who it is for: viewers who want slow, formally rigorous political cinema and are interested in Soviet history. Who it is not for: anyone wanting pace; the film is deliberately airless and almost nothing happens.