The Trial is comprised of painstakingly researched and restored black-and-white footage chronicling one of Stalin’s first show trials, which took place in 1930 in Moscow. The suspenseful, life-threatening situation is real, while the crime is fake. The accused — a group of top-ranking economists and engineers, charged with forming a secret pact with French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré and other Western leaders in order to restore capitalism and fracture the USSR — are forced to confess to crimes they never committed. The court, presided by Andrey Vyshinsky, who later became known as the key prosecutor in the 1937 show trials, delivers death sentences.