Fabular Films presents the historical testimony of Nathaniel Wollf, Harold Saxton, Kenneth Day, Edward Say, Joseph Lumbard, Keith Smerage, Stanley Gilkey, Eugene Cummings, and Ernest Roberts in a reenactment of the 1920 closed room trial, nine episodes of testimony before the Harvard Secret Court. The unwilling covenant each defendant made with the Secret Court was kept secret in a university file box for more than eighty years until The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, exposed the trial in 2002. As an educational document of discrimination in the early 20th Century, the film draws from the original source material and milieu, filming on location in Cambridge and with an all-male cast of Harvard undergraduates, who portray their academic forebears, both the defendants and members of the Court. Inspired by Rashomon and silent era films, but resisting a fictionalized, sensational portrait of the period, the black and white formality of "Perkins 28" underscores the austere charges made against the students, whose unfortunate disclosures have future underpinnings in Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
—Anonymous