This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Two Prosecutors director Sergei Loznitsa, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. An NYFF63 Main Slate selection, Two Prosecutors is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Janus Films.

The latest film from the great Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa is a scalpel-precise tale of the horrors of totalitarian bureaucracy. Adapting a novel by Soviet writer and political prisoner Georgy Demidov, set in the Soviet Union in 1937, Loznitsa follows the attempts of an idealistic government-appointed prosecutor to expose the mistreatment of a dissident Bolshevik writer who has been jailed and tortured without evidence of wrongdoing. As he gradually comes to realize, the lack of cause for the man’s imprisonment is hardly unique under Stalin’s regime, and the neophyte lawyer may be putting himself in danger by exposing his own moral righteousness. Loznitsa constructs his story with a patient yet unmistakable sense of mounting dread, focusing on the devastating minutiae that allows fascism to function in our world.

The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.