Set in 1937, at the peak of Stalin’s Great Purge, acclaimed Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors is a bleak comic parable of tyranny. Against all odds, a complaint letter written in blood, alleging torture by the secret police, escapes incineration at Bryansk Prison and reaches young, idealistic state prosecutor Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov). With an overdetermined sense of righteousness and an utter lack of self-preservation, the woefully misguided Kornyev resolves to make Chairman Stalin aware of the injustices being carried out in his name. Thus begins a descent into the Kafkaesque bureaucratic madness of the totalitarian state.
Based on a novella by the Soviet dissident writer and scientist Georgy Demidov, who was imprisoned for nearly 20 years, including 14 years in Siberia, Loznitsa presents a relentlessly colorless world, brilliantly composed by cinematographer Oleg Mutu, where state-sanctioned terror is barely concealed behind imposing granite facades and stoic professionalism.