There are still great pro-freedom, anti-totalitarian films being made. They just aren’t being made in America. Next year, at the Anti-Communist Film Festival—a project of mine that I hope becomes an annual event—we mean to showcase pro-freedom directors.

One of those would be the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa. The American Film Institute’s Silver Theater and Cultural Center, just outside of Washington, D.C., is currently holding a European Union Film Showcase, and one of the films being screened is Loznitsa’s new film, Two Prosecutors. The film is based on a story by the Russian dissident author and physicist Georgy Demidov. Demidov was held in the gulag for 14 years during World War II and harassed by the state until he died in the late 1980s. His work has been compared to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Two Prosecutors director Sergei Loznitsa, a free-thinking artist, was criticized recently for resigning from the European Film Academy. In 2022, the academy issued a statement expressing “solidarity with Ukraine.” When the academy announced that it would exclude Russian films from awards, Loznitsa objected, saying,

many friends and colleagues, Russian filmmakers, have taken a stand against this insane war. … They are victims as we are of this aggression.

Loznitsa demanded that the academy “not judge people based on their passports” but “on their acts.” 

On March 19, 2022 the Ukrainian Film Academy expelled Loznitsa, stating that he had

repeatedly stressed that he considers himself a cosmopolitan, ‘a man of the world.’ However, now, when Ukraine is struggling to defend its independence, the key concept in the rhetoric of every Ukrainian should be his national identity.

Loznitsa issued a statement the same day:

I was astonished to read of the Ukrainian film academy’s decision to expel me for being a cosmopolite… It is only during the late Stalinist era, from the onset of the antisemitic campaign unleashed by Stalin between 1948 and 1953, that the term acquired a negative connotation in Soviet propaganda discourse. By speaking out against cosmopolitanism, the Ukrainian ‘academy members’ employ this very discourse invented by Stalin.

Two Prosecutors is a devastatingly powerful movie about the deadly bureaucracy of the Soviet Union under Stalin. The film takes place in 1937, when a young attorney, Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), receives a letter from Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), a prisoner in Bryansk. The note is written in blood on a piece of cardboard and alleges that the Russian security services, the NKVD, are torturing and murdering older party veterans like him to replace them with young Stalin loyalists. (Though certainly less bloody, there are parallels here to the modern American left’s tendency since the advent of Barack Obama to toss out more mainstream Democratic Party operatives for hard-core progressives.)

When Kornyev attempts to figure out what is happening to Stepniak, the nightmare begins. In what one critic described accurately as “weaponized inertia,” Kornyev is forced to wait—and wait and wait and wait, as officials hope he will just go away. He doesn’t. There are long shots of grey rooms and corridors where nothing happens on screen except the waiting. The local governor tells Kornyev that Stepniak has a contagious disease, but Kornyev won’t back down. The governor finally allows his request, but with a warning: “Washing your hands with soap won’t save you from certain infections.” Stepniak, we discover, has welts and bruises all over his body, and his urine is red.

Appalled, Kornyev heads to Moscow to meet with Chief Prosecutor Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy). Kornyev gets nowhere, of course, as his situation becomes increasingly desperate and claustrophobic. Stalin’s Russia is rightly portrayed, as one critic noted, as “a malign bureaucracy which protects and replicates itself by infecting those who challenge it with a bacillus of guilt.” This is the dull, inescapable nightmare of Kafka, Orwell, and the academic and governmental star chambers of Britain and America in 2025. There is a growing sense of dread as the audience suspects that Kornyev is naïve and doesn’t fully understand the danger he is in. Stalin is liquidating anyone who might be a competitor. The actors, direction, script, and set design of Two Prosecutors are all first-rate. It’s the kind of film Americans don’t make anymore.

Also playing at the European Union Film Showcase is the new German film Köln 75. This is a fun, kinetic film that celebrates jazz and freedom in 1975 West Germany, a time when the East German Stasi were suppressing all kinds of music. Köln 75 is the true story of a teenager named Vera Brandes (Mala Emde) who convinces jazz master pianist Keith Jarrett (John Magaro) to play a solo concert in Köln, West Germany. The concert recording, The Köln Concert, has become a classic and one of the best-selling jazz recordings of all time. 

Köln 75 is hugely entertaining, with a rapid-fire pace and engaging performances, particularly John Magaro as Jarrett, a stoic perfectionist who is struggling financially. The film’s genre reminds one less of music and more of the against-all-odds sports movie, as Vera bluffs, begs, and hustles her way through putting on a concert when she has no experience as a promoter—just a jazz fan with energy to burn. She races around town, wheeling and dealing, begging for money from her parents, and occasionally breaking the fourth wall by occasionally looking directly at the camera to correct some historic fact—like telling jazz club owners she was 21 when she was really only 16.

(Teendom really was different back in those days. Köln 75 comes out the same year as the release of Uncool, a memoir by Cameron Crowe. Crowe is the journalist and filmmaker who famously began writing for Rolling Stone magazine when he was 15. Crowe’s first cover story for the magazine, on the Allman Brothers, appeared in 1973 when he was 16.)

Two Prosecutors and Köln 75 dramatize two poles of the human experience—one repressive, violent, controlling, and despairing, the other free, spontaneous, youthful, and hopeful. These are precisely the kinds of folks I hope to showcase at the Anti-Communist Film Festival.