The New York Times recently dispatched 60 reporters to cover the Oscars.
60. Six-Zero. I couldn’t believe this, so I checked for myself. Here is Times Hollywood correspondent Sarah Bahr: “Roughly 60 journalists from the Culture, Styles, National, and Business desks will contribute to our live coverage.”
Next year, we are holding an Anti-Communist Film Festival, and we hope that it turns into an annual event where we can showcase pro-freedom directors.
I wonder if the Times can spare a reporter to cover the event.
While there is constant talk in Hollywood of “underrepresented groups” in America that deserve to be featured in major motion pictures, talk that has resulted in absurd DEI standards for movies, the most underrepresented group in the film industry is still freedom-loving people who hate communism. For that, you have to go elsewhere.
At the end of March, a great film will play on the arts circuit in America. Two Prosecutors is directed by the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa. It is based on a story by the dissident author and scientist Georgy Demidov. Demidov, a physicist, was held in the gulag for 14 years during World War II and harassed by the state until his death in the late 1980s. His work has been compared to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Two Prosecutors director Sergei Loznitsa is the kind of free-thinking artist that the American film industry used to produce. He was criticized last year 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 to "not judge people based on their passports" but "on their acts.”
On 19 March 2022, the Ukrainian Film Academy expelled Loznitsa, stating that Loznitsa 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: ”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.”
I saw Two Prosecutors when it screened at the AFI in Washington, D.C. The film is about the deadly bureaucracy of the Soviet Union under Stalin. It’s set in 1937. An attorney named Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) receives a letter from Stepniak (Aleksandr Fillipenko) , 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 veterans like him to replace them with young Stalin loyalists.
When Kornyev tries to figure out what is happening to Stepniak, the nightmare begins. In what one critic described accurately as “weaponized inertia,” Kornyex is forced to wait - and wait and wait and wait, the officials hoping he will just go away. There are long shots of grey rooms and corridors where nothing goes on. 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 has welts and bruises all over his body, and his urine is red.
Kornyev goes to Moscow to meet with chief prosecutor Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy). Kornyez gets nowhere, of course, his situation becoming more and more desperate and claustrophobic. Stalin’s Russia is, as one critic noted, “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 cultural star chambers of Britain and America in 2026. There is a growing sense of dread as the audience suspects that Kornyev 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 that Americans don’t make anymore.
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