Was it an act of sabotage or willful negligence? The non-party engineer Heinz Solter is suddenly arrested and accused of approving a defective pipeline that caused a half million loss to his company. At first, the case seems clear-cut for the state prosecutor, but when he probes deeper, he discovers that Solter had acted against his better judgment due to the pressure from his career-driven and authoritarian boss.. The film, based on an actual crime case, was banned shortly after its release for its critical examination of the problems of a planned economy and the extremely stylized avant-garde imagery. The scathing criticism unintentionally complemented the film by accusing it of stylistic affinities to Antonioni and Fellini..