Two Prosecutors (Zwei Staatsanwälte) at Speed Cinema

Two Prosecutors (Zwei Staatsanwälte)
Directed by Sergei Loznitsa

Saturday, May 23, 3 pm | BUY TICKETS

$12 | $8 Speed members

“What’s most startling about the film for me, however, is not the Russian history and filmmaking per se, but the relevance Two Prosecutors has to our present day.” —Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle

The latest film from the great Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa (My Joy) is a scalpel-precise tale of the horrors of totalitarian bureaucracy.

Adapting a novel by Soviet writer and political prisoner Georgy Demidov, set in the Soviet Union in 1937, Loznitsa follows the attempts of an idealistic government-appointed prosecutor (Alexander Kuznetsov) to expose the mistreatment of a dissident Bolshevik writer who has been jailed and tortured without evidence of wrongdoing. As he gradually comes to realize, the lack of cause for the man’s imprisonment is hardly unique under Stalin’s regime, and the neophyte lawyer may be putting himself in danger by exposing his own moral righteousness.

Loznitsa constructs his story with a patient yet unmistakable sense of mounting dread, focusing on the devastating minutiae that allows fascism to function in our world. 2025, France/Germany/Netherlands/Latvia/Romania/Lithuania/Ukraine, DCP, in Russian, Ukranian, and English with English subtitles, 118 minutes. Recommended for 15+.