Preview: Zwei Staatsanwälte

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, he considers to be 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:

"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 were constantly in my mind as I worked on the screenplay (...). I deliberately ‘invited’ Gogol into the film with Captain Kopeikin (from Dead Souls), then Kafka appeared and crept in on his own – without a special invitation! Two Prosecutors is a tragedy. But as in any true tragedy, there is always room for the grotesque and for farce.

And on the question of relevance today:

“Two Prosecutors” takes place 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 the same in many ways.


Reading from Georgi Demidov's novel Two Prosecutors by Hanns Zischler

Conversation with Sergei Loznitsa, the translators and editors of the novel Irina Rastorgueva and Thomas Martin, Galiani Publishing House, moderated by Natascha Freundel

• Zwei Staatsanwälte, feature film, directed by Sergei Loznitsa, F/D/NL/LV/RO/LT 2025, 118 min., original Russian with German subtitles
  
• starring Sergei Loznitsa, Thomas Martin, Irina Rastorgueva, and others 
  
• Director/screenplay: Sergei Loznitsa 
  
• Director of photography: Oleg Mutu
  
• Cast: Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, Anatoli Beliy
  
• Based on the novel of the same name by Georgi Demidov