Directed by Sergei Loznitsa • 2025 • France, Germany, Romania
Starring Alexander Kuznetsov, Aleksandr Filippenko, Anatoliy Beliy

Summoned with a blood-written note smuggled out of a prison block, an idealistic Soviet prosecutor (Alexander Kuznetsov) pushes past the jail’s leery authorities to interview an elderly, broken-down Bolshevik (Aleksandr Filippenko) condemned as a political undesirable. The young attorney, determined to expose this miscarriage of justice to the authorities in Moscow, soon finds his efforts stymied as an ever-tightening net of suspicion encircles his investigation. Set at the height of the great purge and drenched in the paranoia of Stalin’s police state, the latest triumph from director Sergei Loznitza is a chilling, Kafkaesque thriller about the impunity of power and the matter-of-fact horrors of totalitarianism.