TWO PROSECUTORS
Review by Pat Frickey
© PROGRESS FILM-VERLEIH
TWO PROSECUTORS( ZWEI STAATSANWÄLTE)
FRANCE | GERMANY | NETHERLANDS | LATVIA | ROMANIA | LITHUANIA | UKRAINE 2025
OPENING FEBRUARY 19, 2026 DIRECTED BY SERGEY LOZNITSA
WRITING CREDITS: GEORGY DEMIDOV, SERGEY LOZNITSA
PRINCIPAL ACTORS: ALEKSANDR FILIPPENKO, ALEXANDER KUZNETSOV, ANATOLIY BELIY
It’ s haunting. It’ s chilling. And yet somehow you can’ t look away. The film begins with the camera focused on a massive iron prison gate. As it opens, the audience is invited to go inside a bleak prison to observe the soon-tobe corpses, political prisoners of Stalin’ s Great Purge, still shuffling about. One prisoner is given the secret task of burning all the desperate letters written to Comrade Stalin by the inmates, all protesting their innocence and begging him for mercy. One note written on a scrap of cardboard, in blood, signed by Stepniak( Aleksandr Filippenko), is smuggled out of the prison and miraculously finds its way to the young, idealistic, impeccably dressed government prosecutor, Kornev( Alexander Kuznetsov). Every story needs a hero, but from the desolate opening, the prison scene, a precursor of the Holocaust death camps, the audience already has a premonition that idealism in Stalin’ s Soviet Union is meant to be quashed.
Handsome, clean cut, soft-spoken Kornev, straight out of law school, has been appointed state prosecutor in his hometown of Bryansk. He traces the desperate note to the local prison, and after a long wait, meets with prisoner Stepniak. Kornev is visibly shaken when he is led to Stepniak, a bare skeleton of a man, yet with enough flesh to show him his scars from prison torture. Kornev recognizes him as the highly esteemed intellectual who had lectured at his university law school. Stepniak desperately pleads with Kornev to go to Moscow, to the Politburo, and plead for justice for himself and for the other prisoners, mostly Old Bolshevists and Stalin loyalists. Stepniak, the loyal inmate, who has never betrayed his comrades, alleges
58 HAMBURG HAPPENINGS