Two Prosecutors tells a tale that's sadly predictable but chilling all the same (Film review)

 

Poster for the ninth film I viewed at the 

50th Hong Kong International Film Festival 

 

Two Prosecutors (France-Germany-Netherlands-Latvia-Romania-Lithuania-Ukraine, 2025) 

- Sergei Loznitsa, director and co-scriptwriter (with Georgy Demidov)

- Starring: Alexander Kutznetsov, Aleksandr Filippenko, Anatoliy Beliy 

- Part of the HKIFF's The Masters program 

 

For much of Two Prosecutors, one only sees a single prosecutor on screen: Kornev (portrayed by Alexander Kutznetsove, whose nose looks like that of someone who emerged much the worse from a brutal boxing match or game of rugby!), a young government prosecutor only three months into his career.  Naive and idealistic, after coming into possession of a letter written in blood by a political prisoner, he decides to go see and hear the man: a former local party stalwart who had visited and given a speech about truth and Bolshevism at Kornev's law school.

 

Despite the prison head trying to dissuade him from doing so in multiple ways, Kornev stubbornly persists in meeting with a man considered so dangerous that he's been put in solitary confinement far away from other prisoners and watched over by multiple guards.  This despite  Stepniak (essayed by Aleksandr Filippenko) being elderly and physically weak, and, in fact being pretty close to death's door. 

 

It's pretty obvious that Stepniak has been physically tortured, and so badly that his internal organs are badly messed up.  It's less certain why the old Bolshevik ended up being among the victims of what looked to have been a power struggle that saw the NKVD (secret police; precursor of the KGB) infiltrate and take control of the Communist Party apparatus in their city of Bryansk. In any case, Stepniak adamantly maintained that if only his tale was told to Joseph Stalin, he would be freed and wrongs righted.  And asks Kornev to do just that.  Or, at the very least, appeal to someone in the central government over in Moscow to come clean up the locally centered mess.

 

Kornev, an upright, card-carrying member of the Communist Party, agrees to do so.  And journeys to Moscow to report all this to the man who's effectively his top boss: the Procurator General, Andrey Vyshinsky (Anatoli Beliy plays the film's second titular prosecutor, and real life historical figure).  But when they meet... well, let's just say that this scene is as chilling, if more so, than the moments when Stepniak shows Kornev the torture marks on his body as well as arms and legs.

 

Those who know that 1937, the year that Two Prosecutors is set, was the height of what's known as Stalin's Great Terror (or Purge) will have known early on where this film adaptation of a novella by Georgy Demidov, a Soviet physicist-writer-political prisoner was heading.  But it's the journey, rather than the destination, that really matters with regards to this tale. And director Loznitsa masterfully keep's one attention and stokes one's mounting horror regarding how things will end for the honorable Kornev for this gripping work's entire running time.   

 

By the way, that director Loznitsa was unable to make this film in his native Ukraine or Russia tells you speaks volumes about the current state of those parts of the former Soviet Union.  Equally clear is how Two Prosecutors is a strong indictment of the kind of regime that punishes righteous and idealistic folks who seek to do good unto one's fellow citizens. 

 

My rating for this film: 7.5  

"The March on Rome" and "Eastern Front": the first two films I've viewed at the 2023 Hong Kong International Film Festival (Film reviews)

  

The 47th Hong Kong International Film Festival has commenced!

 

The March on Rome (Italy, 2022)

- Mark Cousins, director and co-scriptwriter 

- Part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival's Reality Bites program

 

It has Rome in its title and is an Italian production but this documentary about the rise -- and fall too, but to a lesser extent -- of fascism in Italy is primarily in English and narrated by its Northern Irish helmer, Mark Cousins -- whose brogue and speaking style some might find calming but I must admit to thinking was at odds with a lot of material presented!  With a far-ranging script co-written by Cousins and Italians Tommaso Renzoni and Tony Saccuci, it splices together such as archival and contemporary film footage, historical photographs and scenes in which actress Alba Rohrwacher playing an Italian mother who's enamoured by fascism before falling out of love with it to advance its arguments; some of which are more compelling than others.   

 

Known for his works on film (notably the 15 hour The Story of Film: An Odyssey), Mark Cousins' The March on Rome discusses the role of cinema as propaganda in supporting the rice of fascim -- particularly by way of a close analysis and dissection of sections of a 49 minute work by Umberto Paradisi (1878-1933) entitled A Noi! Dalla sagra di Napoli al trionfo di Roma that mythologised the titular march of black shirts on Italy's capital in 1922 that led to Benito Mussolini becoming prime minister of the country.  But, actually, I found such as its shorter -- but sharper? -- discussion of fascist architecture, a surprising amount of which is still extant in Italy, to be more on point (along with "Il Duce" and his fellow fascist leaders' proclivity for making speeches from balconies)!

 

Benito Mussolini first appears in The March on Rome as a head floating in, and peering out of, the darkness.  There are scenes in the film in which he appears all powerful but also ones in which he does not appear in control -- and it is interesting to see that this was so even when he was supposed to be approaching or at his peak as well as after he had been sacked in July 1943 by the same monarch, Victor Emmanuel III, who had, Neville Chamberlain-like in 1922, allowed Mussolini to take command of the government.

 

After seeing so much of what Mussolini looked like in life in much of the film, how he looked in death can come as a shock -- even if one's seen the infamous photos of his corpse and that of his mistress hanging upside down in Milan. Seeing a small photo on one's computer screen or (history) book is inadequate preparation for seeing the same image on a big theatrical screen.  But all this is no where as chilling as seeing images of Mussolini and Italian fascism's victims in Ethiopia and Libya, which also appear in The March on Rome, along with horrific statistics of the numbers of people killed there, and by the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese military that Mussolini's Fascists were -- lest we forget -- in an axis of evil with during World War II.

 

These images, more than the footage from A Noi! ("Us!" in Italian), speak to the power of film for me.  Speaking of which: while The March on Rome has visuals which are hard-hitting at times and arresting at others, I must admit to thinking the overall work would have been better served with better audio -- including a narrator with a less laidback-sounding voice than its helmer!        

My rating for this film: 6.5

 

Eastern Front (Ukraine-Latvia-Czech Republic-U.S.A., 2023)

- Vitaly Mansky (who also is the scriptwriter) and Yevhen Titarenko, co-directors

- Part of the HKIFF's Auteurs program

 

"I'm sorry but I feel like throwing up!" Those were my first words to two friends after we got out of the screening of Eastern Front. It's not just that this documentary about the first six months of the still-ongoing war in Ukraine has harrowing footage along with motion sickness-inducing ones filmed by an iPhone of a man running in a battlefield; it's also that it is a psychologically intense watch.

 

This being said; I still want to highly recommend this amazing documentary work, one of whose co-directors, Yevhen Titarenko, is a volunteer paramedic whose battalion, the Hospitallers, have indeed served in the Eastern Front of the war.  (More than by the way: the film's other co-director, Vitaly Mansky, is a veteran Russian director who has spoken out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and and has been placed on a Kremlin wanted list for slander.

 

A good part of Eastern Front takes place at, as its name suggests, the Eastern Front.  We see footage shot from: inside a makeshift ambulance rushing patients to a hospital; inside homes where medics await to be called to duty and from where explosions can be seen and gunfire heard; from trenches that look like something out of a World War I movie (except they are real, and exist in 2022-2023) and where people have been recently killed; and muddy battlefields where the wounded lie and wait to be evacuated.  And we see bravery and caramaderie but also blood, destruction and lots of pain.

But Eastern Front also features talk as well as action, which helps to balance things and also contextualise events and stories.  Some of the conversations take place within war zones but many more take place over in the western part of the country, where there are opportunities for people to relax with a swim in the lake, hanging out with friends, see a comrade's child getting Christened, have dinner with relatives and relatives.  

It may seem strange but the peaceful, "normal" sections of the film actually strengthen it overall.  I think this is not least because it serves to remind the audience that few, if any of the people seen in Eastern Front in military gear and at the battlefront are, in fact, careeer soldiers or even paramedics.  And that they are human beings who have loved ones who care and worry for them and, also, people who they wish to protect -- which is why they are in the situation they are shown to be in but also hope will end before too long, in victory for their nation.

 

My rating for this film: 8.5    

The Hong Kong Way of protest

Just a very small part of the very long chains formed 

by participants of the Hong Kong Way this evening

 Thank you, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia,

for inspiring us with your Baltic Way of 1989

At lunchtime today, thousands of accountants -- yes, accountants! -- marched through the streets of central Hong Kong to voice their opposition to the not-yet-withdrawn extradition bill that would allow people in Hong Kong to be legally extradited to Mainland China from more than just the West Kowloon Terminus of the cross-border Express Rail Link.  Then, this evening, Hong Kongers took a page from an amazing show of unity cum mega political demonstration which took place 30 years ago in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to form their own "human chains" along northern Hong Kong Island and on the other side of Victoria Harbour as far west as Kwai Hing and as far east as Lam Tin, and for good measure, all the way up to the top of the iconic Lion Rock peak! 

The Hong Kong Way was yet another creative -- and peaceful -- way for Hong Kongers to come together and collectively voice their grievances against the government (including the police).  It also constituted a show of unity and strength for a protest movement that began with people turning up as far back as March 31st for a protest march against the proposed extradition bill but really got going in early June, with a 1 million-strong protest march on the 9th of that month.  

Some 75 days on, the protests clearly still have the support of a good percentage of Hong Kongers; as can be seen by enough people turning out to clog miles and miles of streets as well as Victoria Park on a stormy afternoon last Sunday and what must be tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people turning up in -- and from -- various parts of the territory to take part in the Hong Kong Way this evening.  Furthermore, a good number of people passing by my section of the Hong Kong Way this evening -- be it in trams, buses, taxis or private cars, or on motorbikes, bicycles or foot -- were showing their support by doing such as vocally shouting out their encouragement, tooting their vehicles' horns and, in the case of a bus driver, putting up "Eye4HK" messages where one usually sees route information being indicated on his vehicle.

One might be moved to wonder why those people didn't actually take part in this protest even though they support it.  Sadly, fear clearly is a factor; what with Beijing pressuring many companies to toe the line, including by firing employees who take part in protests, even those that are legal and Beijing-backed -- not just pro-Beijing -- thugs targeting protesters (but often ending up indiscriminately attacking people in the area).  Indeed, it was quite noticeable this evening that a number of passengers on passing buses and trams sought to show their support of the Hong Kong Way in ways that wouldn't draw too much attention from the other passengers seated near them.

In contrast, the one bus passenger who decided to show his opposition to the protest by flipping us the bird did so very openly as well as rudely -- though he wasn't brave enough to accept our suggestion that he come down from his perch on the upper deck and off the bus into our midst!  And for the record: a convoy of taxis with big China flags sticking from them also drove by us; many of them empty of passengers and, strangely, with their "For hire" signs still on!

Rather than dampen our spirits though, the sight of those taxis actually got Hong Kong protesters displaying our distinctive sense of humor once more since they got greeted by shouts -- in English -- of "Free China"!  And to put things in context: over the course of the two hours that this event took place, taxis also did drive by whose drivers showed their support of the protesters by honking their horns in a particular pattern that we've come to recognize and giving the thumbs up signal.

In a bid to (further) raise international awareness of this protest movement that's now also calling for genuine universal suffrage for Hong Kong, there were orchestrated shouts of English of "Free Hong Kong" and "Democracy now" (along with other chants in Cantonese, the most popular on the night of which was "Hong Kong yan, ga yau!").  There also were attempts to get people to belt out the original English version of Do You Hear the People Sing? (rather than the Cantonese one).  Still, it has to be said that people seemed far more comfortable singing another song that's come to be associated with Hong Kong pro-democracy protests: Beyond's Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies; a beautiful English version of which exists, courtesy of a Brazilian man! :)