In Madrid, a series resurrects the ghosts of Franco's failed coup of February 23, 1981

To reach the Anatomy of a Moment set, you have to leave the Madrid-Valencia highway by a barely marked exit. The small, poorly paved road you took becomes a dirt track that winds across the plateau, between cornfields where gigantic sprinklers come and go. An abandoned farm stands out for the mass of very urban cars that cluster around it under the scorching sun of this early summer. Under the shed, a canteen has been set up. A long building, which looks furiously like a disused pigsty, is isolated from the rest of the world by an airlock. Once through this, you enter a long room at the back where uniformed judges sit.

A member of the crew explains this disconcerting relocation of the filming of one of the most anticipated series in Spain: "The production designer [Pepe Dominguez del Olmo] looked everywhere for a volume that would allow the ceiling to enter the frame, like the real courtroom. He found only that." The trial in question, which serves as the final act of Anatomy of a Moment , opened in February 1982, in a converted courtroom in the military district of Campamento, Madrid, a year after the attempted coup d'état that attempted to interrupt the course of Spain's democratic transition following the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.

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