Soviet Union, 1937.Thousands of letters from detainees falsely accused by the regime are burned in a prison cell. Against all odds, one of them reaches its destination, upon the desk of the newly appointed local prosecutor, Alexander Kornyev.

Kornyev does his utmost to meet the prisoner, a victim of agents of the secret police, the NKVD. A dedicated Bolshevik of integrity, the young prosecutor suspects foul play.
His quest for justice will take him all the way to the office of the Attorney General in Moscow. In the age of the great Stalinist purges, this is the plunge of a man into the corridors of a totalitarian regime that does not bear said name.

Sergey Loznitsa returns to fiction in the historical drama based on an unpublished novella from a Gulag survivor.