Film Forum

Soviet Union, 1937: A newly appointed, idealistic young prosecutor is spurred to meet a prison inmate after reading a desperate appeal scrawled in blood. The prosecutor recognizes this prisoner as a former law school professor—and is told a mortifying account of abuse and betrayal perpetrated by the secret police. He promises to report this injustice to the Attorney General in Moscow... but doesn’t realize the bureaucratically murderous trap he’s stepped in to. Based upon a long-unpublished novella by Soviet gulag survivor Georgy Demidov, TWO PROSECUTORS paints a hypnotic, chilling, blackly comic portrait of the mechanisms of Great Purge-era tyranny, with a potent contemporary resonance.

Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film and The Ashes and Diamonds Fund for Eastern European Film
 
2025     118 MIN.     FRANCE / GERMANY / THE NETHERLANDS / LATVIA / ROMANIA / LITHUANIA
JANUS FILMS     IN RUSSIAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES

Reviews

“One of [Loznitsa’s] most accessible films to date, with relevance to every country wrestling with authoritarian political parties right now.”
– Damon Wise, Deadline

“A darkly absurdist odyssey through the Soviet totalitarian nightmare.”
– Jessica Kiang, Variety

“The effectiveness and subtle suspense of Loznitsa’s visuals are matched by the chamber-piece intensity of the characters’ verbal face-offs, dense with specialist jargon and gallows humor, and not giving a damn if you can’t keep up.”
– David Katz, IndieWire

“[A] crisply made shaggy dog story, with its bleak sense of humor, somehow felt like the movie of the moment... a bleak shout of futility that’s also strangely, bitterly funny.”
– Stephanie Zacharek, TIME (“The 12 Best Movies of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival”)

“Impeccably directed and impressively acted, this slow-burn story of political injustice is filled to the brim with atmosphere—specifically the stifling, claustrophobic atmosphere of the U.S.S.R. at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge.”
– Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter