In 1930 in Moscow, USSR. the Soviet government puts a group of top rank economists and engineers on trial, accusing them of plotting a coup d’état. The charges are fabricated and the punishment, if convicted, is death.

Sergei Loznitsa’s reconstructed and condensed archival documentary of a Stalinist show trial is a rare revelation of the process by which justice is staged, citizens are purged, and a nation fooled. Behind the courtroom’s grandiloquent accusations and rehearsed confessions is a template for terror.