TWO PROSECUTORS Luminaries

Set in 1937, at the peak of Josef Stalin’s Great Purge — yet chillingly relevant today — Sergei Loznitsa’s dark parable of tyranny is based on a short story by the dissident writer and scientist Georgy Demidov, who was himself imprisoned for nearly 20 years. Against all odds, a complaint letter written in blood escapes the bonfire at Bryansk prison and reaches young state prosecutor Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), who visits the prison to investigate. After getting the runaround from the suspicious guards, Kornyev eventually meets the letter’s author — Stepniak (Aleksandr Fillipenko), a former attorney — who alleges torture by the secret police (NKVD) to elicit forced confessions from him and other older party loyalists in an effort to subvert Soviet society. Kornyev resolves to make Chairman Stalin aware of this treason, this injustice, not realizing the terror is coming from the top. Thus begins young Kornyev’s descent into the Kafkaesque bureaucratic madness and Dantean horrors of Stalin’s totalitarian state. Loznitsa presents a relentlessly gray world, where terror-fueled torpor has taken root, and rationality is in retreat, tightly framed in Academy ratio by famed cinematographer Oleg Mutu. –Todd Hitchcock