Preview: Two Prosecutors
2/1/2026, 7 PM

In his documentaries and feature films, internationally acclaimed director Sergei Loznitsa deals intensively with sometimes disturbing narratives 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. Publication was unthinkable. His work was only discovered in the wake of perestroika. 

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

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

Sergei Loznitsa on adapting the novel for film:
“Though I tried to follow Demidov’s text as closely as possible when writing the script, it was also important to me to place the narrative into a wider philosophical and cultural context. The shadows of Gogol and Kafka were persistently looming before me and over the story as I worked on the script.

Gogol, I have consciously “invited” into the film with Captain Kopeikin (The dead souls), but 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 on the question of relevance today:
Two Prosecutors is also set during Stalin’s purges, when the whole country is gripped with fear. I’m fascinated by this psychological mechanism – both in an individual and in collective psyche, which enables and sustains the existence of a totalitarian society, based entirely on terror. Such psychological patterns are repeated century after century, generation after generation, and in the end, all totalitarian regimes are, in so many ways, alike.