A seminal work of contemporary film and political memory

Review of Two Prosecutors, by Sergei Loznitsa

With Two Prosecutors (Dva prokurora, 2025), Sergei Loznitsa consolidates one of the most coherent and urgent topics in contemporary European cinema, reaffirming his place at the intersection of fiction, historical memory and political reflection. The film, awarded the FIPRESCI Prize at the latest edition of Seminci in Valladolid by a jury composed of Loreta Gandolfi, Giuseppe Sedia and Elsa Tébar, represents in many ways a crystallisation of the themes, concerns and formal procedures that have characterised his oeuvre, while at the same time introducing new elements that broaden his aesthetic and ethical horizons.

Two Prosecutors stands in direct dialogue with Loznitsa’s body of work. Throughout his career – more than twenty documentaries and five feature films to date – the Ukrainian filmmaker has explored, with relentless rigour, the history of Soviet totalitarianism and its contemporary echoes. Loznitsa films the world as a living archive, like a fish gasping for air at the surface of the water. From works such as My Joy (Schast’e moe, 2010) and In the Fog (V tumane, 2012) to documentaries such as State Funeral (2019) and Babi Yar. Context (2021), the filmmaker has demonstrated both a stylistic and ethical obsession with the critical reconstruction of collective trauma. Two Prosecutors extends this gaze, but shifts the focus to a fictional narrative with an almost theatrical structure, based on the novel of the same name by Georgy Demidov, written in 1969 and published posthumously in 2009. Loznitsa also mentions Kafka as a great inspiration for his account of bureaucracy and terror. The revival of this text, written by an author persecuted by the Soviet apparatus, is no coincidence: Loznitsa tackles the story of a young prosecutor during the Purges of 1937 and reveals the impossibility of justice under a system that devours even its own defenders.

The political and symbolic value of Two Prosecutors as a tool for denunciation and historical reflection in a global context that seems to be reviving the ghosts of authoritarianism is undeniable. Loznitsa not only narrates an episode of Stalinist repression, but also points to the persistence of totalitarianism in the present. In the film, the letter written in blood by an unjustly accused prisoner – a restrained denunciation that miraculously avoids destruction – becomes a metaphor for all silenced voices. Prosecutor Kornev’s investigation, guided by revolutionary ideals and blind to the nature of the regime he serves, encapsulates the tragedy of the militant caught up in the machinery of state terror. The most disturbing thing is precisely the implicit recognition of the relevance of this psychological mechanism today, as the director himself points out: fear, the bureaucratisation of violence and unconscious complicity are transhistorical evils, which are replicated today under new guises.

Two Prosecutors also stands out for its formal treatment, which reinforces its political content in an inseparable aesthetic fabric. The decision to film in academy format (1.33:1) and the total absence of camera movement place the viewer in a closed, almost claustrophobic space, in keeping with the prison logic of the story. The static shots, composed with pictorial precision, evoke both the style of Dreyer’s cinema and the temporal rigour of Béla Tarr, highlighting the almost sculptural nature of time on screen. The desaturated colour palette, which deliberately excludes the colours of life except for red – a symbol of blood, power or warning – reinforces the feeling of moral suffocation and vital uprooting. Thus, image and narrative converge in the same thesis: the impossibility of fully representing terror requires a filmic language that renounces spectacle in order to assume the burden of memory. Here, Loznitsa demonstrates an aesthetic maturity that turns cinema into an exercise in resistance.

Two Prosecutors is not just another film in Sergei Loznitsa’s filmography, but a central piece that stands in dialogue with history and challenges contemporary viewers to look squarely at the cracks in justice and memory, warning of the danger of totalitarianism with a gaze that travels from the past to the present and projects itself into the future as a serious warning. A reaffirmation of cinema as a critical and necessary space for confronting, again and again, the ghosts of power.

by Elsa Tébar

Edited by Birgit Beumers
©FIPRESCI 2025