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.”
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