The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Two Prosecutors.
I understand this film is based on a story that really resonated with you?
Sergey Loznitsa: The film is based on a story by Georgy Demidov, who was arrested in 1938 and spent nearly fourteen years in prison camps. After his exile, around the 1960s, he wrote his memoirs and short stories. In the 1980s, the KGB confiscated all of his manuscripts. His daughter spent years fighting to get them back, but Demidov died in 1987, never having seen his work published. This particular story was published in 2008 by a press that specialized in repressions, executions, and exiles. I was collecting any material I could find on this topic, and after completing my first film about Stalin’s regime using archival footage, I was looking for a story that could continue what I had already begun to explore. This short story came my way, and I decided to adapt it.
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here
How did you work with your cinematographer on the film’s framing?
SL: For all of my fiction films, I work with the same cinematographer, Oleg Mutu. He comes from the Romanian New Wave and shot some of its most important films, including The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. When I saw those, I was looking for a cinematographer for my first feature, and we’ve been collaborating ever since. Every film is a collaborative process. For this one, the first decision was the format, the classic academy ratio. The second, obvious choice was static images. Then Oleg suggested the color palette. We removed all the lively colors: green, yellow, orange, purple, light blue. They’re completely absent from the film, from the sets and costumes. We also added a filter. All of these tools serve to immerse the audience in a specific place and time. What surprised me is how many directors nowadays are returning to the classic academy format. It wasn’t a conspiracy between us, but there’s something in the air that brings us back to it.
The lighting through the high windows creates a sense of both hope and hopelessness. Can you talk about that?
SL: I hadn’t thought about it that way. There were general decisions we made about the lighting. It was supposed to be soft and tender. If you compare it with Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age, it’s a glimpse of light that comes from darkness. But I’m not linking it to the idea of hope, because the space we are in is completely hopeless. None of the characters are meant to be heroes. They’re all anti-heroes. There is no positive character in the film. They all work for the system; they represent the system. Even if their wishes or desires are somehow wholesome, they are still part of it. Someone can understand what kind of system they exist in, like the older prosecutor… and someone cannot, like the young man. As Dante said, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
The pacing is remarkable. You let scenes fully play out without any rush. Can you talk about that approach?
SL: We are in a place where there is no rush. You could spend ten years within the same four walls, with the same characters and one single thought. I wanted to give the audience an opportunity to pause and reflect, so there’s always a little room, a space in time. The approach nowadays, constantly having to stimulate, to impress, has a lot to do with the era we live in. My film is about a different time, so I have to play by those rules and break through that wall. Maybe it’s also the influence of my documentary work. The perception of an image changes with time. By spending time with an image, we start to notice things we haven’t seen before. That wouldn’t happen if it were fast-paced.
Each performance is magnificent, especially those who communicate more through silence and gesture than words. How did you find the casting process?
SL: Let’s talk about the prisoners as an example. When it came to casting, I requested that we invite people who had actually been incarcerated, and also real prison guards. If I put those two people in front of you and asked you to tell me who was the prisoner and who was the guard, you probably could not distinguish them. I think it’s a quite interesting phenomenon. As for the lead actors, they’re marvelous. The three leads all left Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. It was a fateful decision for all three of them — what they left behind, at least for their careers. But at the time, that wasn’t the first thing they were thinking about. You have to have a certain sense of character, and I think the choices they made as real people, they translated to the characters they play in the film. One challenge I faced was that the young prosecutor and the older prisoner belong to two different schools of acting. The latter comes from the Soviet theater tradition of the 1960s, and the younger actor represents contemporary technique. They’re both in the same scene, and it was an important task to bring those two schools together. Not everything could be resolved on set. The actor who portrayed the prisoner, for instance… all of his vocal work had to be adjusted in post-production to bridge the gap between old-fashioned theatrical speech and the contemporary style.
Where did you find the locations? They look authentically 1930s.
SL: It’s a real prison, built in 1905 and deactivated in 2007. The first time we visited, it was an almost visceral feeling. You could sense the suffering that had accumulated there over the years. Our art directors began to clean the walls, and it took on the look of a film set. The prison cell was actually built inside the gymnasium, because physically it’s impossible to fit camera equipment into real cells. We could move the walls around as needed. The train scene was shot in the same space. For the office, we used an old radio building in Riga, also in the style of the 1930s. Everything was filmed in Riga.