Returning to the festival circuit last year with some of the most acclaim of his career, Sergei Loznitsa’s Cannes premiere Two Prosectuors will now get a U.S. release beginning March 20. Ahead of the debut, Janus Films has unveiled the new trailer and poster.
Here’s the synopsis: “Soviet Union, 1937. Thousands of letters from detainees falsely accused by the regime are burned in a prison cell. Against all odds, one of them reaches its destination, upon the desk of the newly appointed local prosecutor, Alexander Kornyev. Kornyev does his utmost to meet the prisoner, a victim of agents of the secret police, the NKVD. A dedicated Bolshevik of integrity, the young prosecutor suspects foul play. His quest for justice will take him all the way to the office of the Attorney General in Moscow. In the age of the great Stalinist purges, this is the plunge of a man into the corridors of a totalitarian regime.”
Leonardo Goi said in his Cannes review, ” Two Prosecutors exemplifies a salient trait of Loznitsa’s forays into the past: rather than caches of some bygone eras, these are genealogical works that invite us to consider the legacy of those horrors today. A few years back, the director claimed the goal of his archival docs was “to portray the past as if it were the present,” to render history so tangible that people “can touch it with their skin.” So it is with Two Prosecutors, a period piece eerily in-synch with the anxieties of our 21st, post-truth century. Summoned to a prison by an inmate who somehow managed to smuggle a call for help from behind bars, Kornyev quickly realizes the NKVD has gone rogue, torturing people into confessing crimes they’ve never committed. Certain that his superiors will want to restore justice, he travels to Moscow for help from the Attorney General.”
See the trailer below.
