CANNES, France – Sergei Loznitsa, the Kyiv-raised filmmaker whose recent career has moved between documentary features and scripted work, brought his latest drama, “Two Prosecutors,” to the 2025 Cannes Film Festival competition with a story engineered around procedure: the way a state is administered, the way a file is moved, and the way a legal system can be made to perform obedience instead of justice.
Set in the Soviet Union in 1937 during Stalin’s purges, the film is structured as a chain of institutional encounters rather than a conventional courtroom narrative. A letter-one of countless pieces of private testimony that authorities want destroyed-survives long enough to reach a newly appointed prosecutor, Alexander Kornyev (Alexander Kuznetsov), and that survival is enough to initiate the plot’s single question: what happens when a believer in the rule of law tries to practice law inside a system that no longer recognizes it.
For the global film business, “Two Prosecutors” is also a familiar kind of Cannes proposition: a high-prestige, politically legible European art-house title that uses historical setting to stage an argument about institutions-how they protect themselves, how they distribute fear, and how they turn time and delay into a method of control. The festival platform matters because a Cannes competition slot typically functions as an international marketplace signal as much as a cultural one, shaping distribution interest and the film’s critical positioning across territories.
Paperwork, waiting rooms, and controlled access as instruments of power
One critic described Loznitsa’s dramatized features as “deliberately paced,” marked by “a bleakly absurdist style,” “a bleached palette,” and “an eye for grim tableaus”-formal choices that, in “Two Prosecutors,” align directly with the story’s emphasis on bureaucratic pressure rather than overt violence.
The film’s opening is presented as a practical act of regime maintenance: an inmate is assigned to burn “an enormous bag of letters” that are deemed threatening. Among the correspondence is one letter that becomes the film’s narrative engine, a surviving fragment of citizen testimony that the system has not yet successfully erased.
That message is from a prisoner, Stepniak, who has attempted to contact a legal office in Bryansk. Kornyev arrives to see him to the surprise-and immediate defensive maneuvering-of prison authorities. Kornyev is described as a new investigating prosecutor whose role is to address citizens’ complaints and confirm that procedures align with the law; crucially, he “still believes in socialist ideals and the promise of the revolution,” a belief the surrounding system treats as a solvable problem rather than a professional ethic.
The film’s suspense is framed by inertia rather than action. As one critic put it: “The suspense is simply in waiting for the totalitarian machinery to grind into place.” The state’s methods are administrative: keep the visitor waiting, deny access, misdirect, cite health risks, and use the calendar as leverage. These tactics echo the broader logic of Stalinist justice, in which formal guarantees of due process were hollowed out while the appearance of procedure remained.
Loznitsa stages this as a sequence of escalating procedural obstacles. Kornyev is made to sit for long stretches; officials insist that Stepniak is ill and infectious; and when Kornyev persists-because he remembers Stepniak as “a respected legal mind” from law school-the system shifts into other forms of control that look, on the surface, like routine governance. In doing so, the film repeatedly contrasts the ideal of a rules-based prosecution service-what would later be articulated in modern guarantees of fair trial and prosecutorial independence in instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights-with an apparatus that uses similar paperwork and procedures to opposite ends.
The two prosecutors: idealism meets the architecture of fear
At the center of the film is the long-delayed meeting between Kornyev and Stepniak (Alexander Filippenko), a prisoner who has been tortured and “surely does not have long to live.” Stepniak initially distrusts Kornyev but instructs him to get word to Stalin, hoping the leader will be “horrified at the secret police’s behavior.” The request underlines a central irony of the terror: faith that redress is still possible if only the right official learns the truth.
The story’s movement from the regional prison system toward Moscow is less a change of scenery than a widening of the same machinery. In the film, Kornyev ultimately reaches Vyshynsky (Anatoly Beliy), identified as the state prosecutor in Moscow, and addresses him with a “naivete” that Vyshynsky appears to find “almost touching.” The encounter places two models of prosecution in direct opposition: one grounded in the idea of legality as constraint on state action, the other in loyalty to the political line and its demands.
A separate critic summarized the premise as a “thought experiment” situated in the terrors of Stalin’s Russia: a courageous, newly appointed state prosecutor investigating a prisoner’s complaints of injustice and violence, entering a prison with no guarantee of leaving it. That critic described Loznitsa’s method as a slow, measured observation of Kornyev’s descent into a bureaucratic abyss, where officials attempt-first gently-to “cajole him into submission.” The drama lies in whether an individual functionary can maintain professional integrity when every institutional signal rewards compliance instead.
Even the casting is presented as part of the film’s institutional argument. One critic noted the effect of placing the “clean-cut, presentable” Kuznetsov amid characters with “the bearing of the walking dead,” suggesting a visual hierarchy of who can still imagine agency and who has learned to survive by anticipating what power wants. The visual contrast turns the ensemble into a cross-section of a system: the newly arrived idealist, the already-compromised middle managers, and the functionaries who have been ground down into routine complicity.
Why Cannes competition remains an industry instrument for this kind of film
“Two Prosecutors” arrives at Cannes as a kind of international business object that the festival has historically been built to circulate: an auteur-driven drama, anchored by a legible political setting, designed for cross-border critical uptake and specialty distribution. For sales agents and distributors, the Stalinist backdrop is not just historical texture; it signals a film that can be programmed in festivals, repertory cinemas, and policy-adjacent cultural forums where questions of law, responsibility, and state power are already on the agenda.
In practical terms, a Cannes competition berth can compress multiple industry functions into one week: a visibility event for press, a positioning platform for sales and acquisitions conversations, and a signaling mechanism for exhibitors, programmers, and award-season strategists who track Cannes as a pipeline for prestige titles. Even for films that will ultimately live in narrower theatrical footprints, Cannes is often where a public narrative about “importance” is constructed-through reviews, critic rankings, and the institutional validation of competition status. Over time, that narrative influences which films are invited into museum programs, academic syllabi, and policy debates about how authoritarian pasts are remembered.
Loznitsa’s film also demonstrates how festival titles can be built around governance rather than spectacle. Here, the entertainment proposition is inseparable from administrative realism: the meaningful “action” is waiting, being redirected, being placed in rooms, being told to return later, and being confronted with official calm in the presence of suffering. These are story beats that translate across national contexts precisely because they are recognizable as institutional behaviors, not local color-and because they mirror experiences that citizens still report in contemporary dealings with opaque bureaucracies.
The film’s emphasis on law is equally industry-relevant because it clarifies the film’s audience contract. “Two Prosecutors” is not positioned as an espionage thriller or a procedural entertainment designed around clever solutions; it is positioned as a narrative about the conditions that make solutions impossible-about institutions that stage legality while withholding accountability. That framing makes the film legible not only to cinephiles but also to readers of legal commentary and public-policy reporting, for whom questions of how institutions fail are already familiar terrain.
A historical setting used to stage a contemporary industry question: what institutions do stories challenge?
A Cannes competition film about the justice system and political fear is also, inevitably, a film about the role of cultural production under pressure-what a filmmaker chooses to represent, what festivals choose to elevate, and how those choices circulate internationally. Loznitsa’s decision to return to the 1930s places “Two Prosecutors” in dialogue with his own documentary work on state violence and memory, and with a broader European conversation about how film can examine the gap between official legality and lived experience.
Loznitsa’s story mechanics are explicit: Kornyev’s belief in the law is not merely a personality trait; it is the vulnerability the system exploits. The prison authorities’ surprise at Kornyev’s visit, and their reliance on delay and procedural manipulation, establishes the film’s governing logic early: the institution does not need to announce that rules have changed; it merely needs to act as though they have, until everyone behaves accordingly.
That logic fits Cannes’s long-standing interest in films about governance, state power, and civic life-subjects that tend to travel well on the festival circuit because they invite public interpretation without requiring insider knowledge of a specific entertainment market. For the international industry, this is part of why period political dramas remain durable in the festival economy: they offer a clear thematic frame for curators and critics, and they can be marketed across languages through a shared vocabulary of “institutions,” “law,” “fear,” and “bureaucracy.” In that sense, “Two Prosecutors” sits alongside earlier Loznitsa works such as “Austerlitz,” which examined the ethics of spectatorship at former concentration camps, as part of a body of work preoccupied with how state violence is organized and remembered. Austerlitz [1]
As of May 15, 2025, “Two Prosecutors” was screening in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, with its festival life just beginning to determine how widely this particular account of law under pressure will travel next.
