Two Prosecutors

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. Set at the height of the great purge and drenched in the paranoia of Stalin’s police state, filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s latest triumph is a chilling, Kafkaesque thriller about the impunity of power and matter-of-fact horrors of fascism.

ONE SHOW ONLY! Wednesday, April 29 @ 8PM in Avalon 1