“You make yourself vulnerable if you work late,” a colleague (Sebastian Urzendowsky) in the Political Prosecutions Department tells Seyo Kim (Chen Emilie Yan) in “Prosecution,” driving her home from work when the air has been let out of her tires. He might as well be speaking for her when he acknowledges that he joined the division himself when it’s thankless work, but likes to be in the middle of the action, a trade-off she’s accepted herself when the more dangerous it feels, the more she can feel like she’s making a difference in sending perpetrators of hate crimes to prison. Yet it becomes uncomfortable in ways she can’t imagine when she becomes the survivor of such an attack herself, realizing she’s at the mercy of a fallible system that pains her more to think she’s upholding than any residual scars left from an encounter with a trio of Nazi sympathizers where she was pelted with Molotov cocktails.
In the meticulous and searing legal drama directed by Faraz Shariat from a script by Claudia Schaefer, Jee-Un Kim and Dr. Sun-Ju Choi, Seyo’s case is immediately and cleverly presented as what it is in the grand scheme of things, a red file folder where it is stacked alongside hundreds of others in a push cart where the employee of the court shows no urgency to get it down the hall. When Seyo wastes no time at the moment of her attack ordering officers to conduct a forensic investigation rather than be treated at a hospital, the frustration of a sluggish system at her own place of work is bound to get to her and though her bosses warn against being anywhere near the case for the conflict of interest it will pose later, she nonetheless begins a process of gathering evidence on her own.
Shariat is wise to keep the perpetrator offscreen for the longest time even after it seems Seyo has figured it all out when it allows for all the invisible enemies inherent to the bureaucracy to be seen and there are plenty of bad actors involved, quite possibly even including Seyo herself. Her immediate response to the attack is to get a gun and bulletproof windows for her car, which it’s suggested will only heighten the potential for another one, and her contact with an attorney (Julia Jentsch) she often faces off in court with notes how many cases of merit actually never end up before a judge when the prosecution drops them ahead of time. She’s frequently told It’s better to have this imperfect practice of jurisprudence than whatever alternative there could be, when airing her frustrations to those she works with, yet the film renders an indictment long before it sees her trying any case when she sees how even well-intentioned state authorities have grown lax telling themselves just this, allowing a sophisticated system of far-right agitators to flourish and even begin to infiltrate law enforcement.
Not unexpectedly, the attack on Seyo is discovered to be just one of many interconnected incidents and as she is brought into contact with others that have been intimidated by white supremacists — looking at them not as case files, but finally having face-to-face interactions — the film increasingly puts a human face on crimes that are incrementally disconnected from any tactile value they have as they move through the system that has a tendency to reduce people to paperwork. Ironically, “Prosecution” is at its strongest when Shariat gets creative in reflecting the structures built by people that subsequently inure them from dealing with actual issues – the director’s use of architecture is striking throughout — and slightly less so with fleshing out the characters themselves, having a lead that can be frustratingly passive at times and introducing a variety of people in Seyo’s orbit that seem more dynamic than what their specific role in the narrative allows for. Yet if ruthless efficiency is what Seyo herself strives for, the film offers that satisfaction that eludes her on screen in its driving narrative that proves gripping in its entirety, itself picking up the slack in illuminating a system that may not always serve society as best it can.
“Prosecution” will screen again at Berlinale on February 16th at 1 pm at Cubix 7, February 17th at 10 am at ADK am Hanseatenweg, February 20th at 1 pm at the Bluemax Theater and February 21st at 3 pm at Cubix 9.