Few contemporary filmmakers have examined Soviet power and its afterlives with the precision and formal rigour of Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa. In his work on this subject, he often avoids commentary and psychologising to let procedures and institutions speak, revealing the chilling “normality” of violence. 

The conversation grows out of two screenings: Loznitsa’s documentary The Trial and his most recent fiction film Two Prosecutors. Taken together, they open a stark view onto Soviet terror as something organised and maintained through staged justice, files, signatures, corridors and locks. Moderated by Polly Jones (University College, Oxford), a scholar of Soviet culture and memory politics, the event will touch upon the films’ key themes and the contemporary resonance of these histories.

The screenings of Two Prosecutors and The Trial are organised in collaboration with Curzon and will take place on 9 and 10 March respectively.

Image courtesy of ATOMS & VOID

Sergei Loznitsa is a Ukrainian film director who was born in 1964 in Baranovichi. He grew up in Kyiv, where he graduated from the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and worked as a scientist. In 1997, he graduated from the Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, where he studied feature filmmaking. Loznitsa has been making films since 1996, and to date he has directed 28 award-winning documentaries and five fiction films. In 2018, he received the award for Best Director in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival for his fourth feature film, Donbass. His most recent fiction film, Two Prosecutors, was presented in the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025.

Polly Jones is Professor of Russian and Schrecker-Barbour Fellow at University College, Oxford. She is the author and editor of several books on Soviet cultural history and politics, including Revolution Rekindled. The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography and Myth (OUP, 2019), Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70 (Yale, 2013), and Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Professor Jones appears regularly on radio and TV to talk about Russian culture and history, and was a consultant to Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin.

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