Director – Sergei Loznitsa – 2025 – France, Germany, Romania, Latvia, Netherlands, Lithuania – Cert. 12A – 118m
****1/2
Stalinist Russia, 1937. A young, idealistic prosecutor takes up the case of an unjustly imprisoned, political prisoner – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th
A prison yard. Impassive guards. Inmates on scaffolding work at plastering the exterior wall. A man from a new prisoner detail is given a sack of letters and locked in a cell with a stove. He must burn the letters.
Given two matches, he reads some of the letters before incineration. One is written in blood from an inmate named Stepniak requesting a visit from a prosecutor.
The young, fresh faced prosecutor Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov) arrives at the prison to see the governor. He is seen instead to the duty assistant (Andria Keiss).
The prosecutor is received, but the interviewing duty assistant lives in a different world. The prison staff live in a world where the apple cart is never to be upset and an easy life is paramount. They laugh uproariously at the current joke doing the rounds about a political celebrity being imprisoned both before and after the Revolution.
They do their jobs efficiently, but woe beside interfering busybodies.… Read the rest
