Country: France, Germany, Netherlands, Latvia, Romania, Lithuania, Ukraine
Language: Russian, Ukrainian, English

About the film:

Summoned with a blood-written note smuggled out of a prison block, an idealistic state lawyer (Alexander Kuznetsov) pushes past the prison’s leery authorities to interview an elderly, broken-down Bolshevik (Aleksandr Filippenko). The young attorney, determined to expose the miscarriages of justice that landed the man in confinement, finds the eye of the state turned on him instead, as an ever-tightening net encircles his investigation.

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.

About the filmmaker:

Sergei Loznitsa is a Ukrainian filmmaker celebrated for his rigorous, unflinching explorations of history, politics, and collective memory. Trained in mathematics and later filmmaking in Moscow, Loznitsa first gained international recognition for his powerful documentaries before moving into narrative features. His fiction film Donbass won the Best Director prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, while his documentary Maidan offered an immersive portrait of Ukraine’s 2014 revolution.

Blending observational precision with moral urgency, Loznitsa’s work has become a vital cinematic record of Eastern Europe’s turbulent modern history, earning major festival premieres and critical acclaim worldwide.

MAJOR SUPPORT
Ohio Arts Council
Greater Columbus Arts Council
The Columbus Foundation
Campus Partners

WITH HELP FROM
G&J Pepsi
WOSU Public Media