A man befriends a fellow criminal as the two of them begin serving their sentence on a dreadful prison island, which inspires the man to plot his escape.
The true story of WWII's notorious Sobibor Nazi death camp, where a courageous inmate orchestrates and leads the escape of over 300 prisoners.
A story set in Indochina in 1959, a lawless land controlled by the criminal class: Vietnamese warlords and European war-criminals. Den-Dhin-Chan Labor Camp is run by four such dangerous men. The worst prison in the land, it is here that an Irish, former-champion boxer Martin Tillman has made a name for himself fighting tournaments, on which wealthy criminals gamble in high stakes events. When Tillman is due for release, he just wants to return home, but the corrupt forces running the jail will do everything in their power to keep him locked down. When all that Tillman holds dear is taken away in a vicious act of violence, he is forced to confront the men responsible and take his revenge. The birth of a legend.
Cambodia, once the ancient kingdom of Funan, April 17th, 1975. The entire country falls under the tyranny of Angkar, the communist party of the Khmer Rouge. The cities are abandoned, the population is thrown to the roads and forced to walk towards an uncertain future…
Lu and Feng are a devoted couple forced to separate when Lu is arrested and sent to a labor camp as a political prisoner during the Cultural Revolution. He finally returns home only to find that his beloved wife no longer remembers him.
A young man recalls his childhood growing up in a poor alley in Beijing during the 1950s and 1960s.
When a woman accidentally kills her detested husband, a selfless young man takes the blame and goes to prison. Complications ensue when he is provisionally released.
The beginning of 1945, Poland. In a newly liberated country, the Communist Security Service is annihilating its enemies under the guise of punishing "national traitors." They organize a labor camp for Germans, Silesians and Poles, on the site of a former Nazi concentration camp called Zgoda / Reconciliation. Franek, who is in love with the Polish prisoner Anna, goes to work as a warder in the camp to save her. He does not know that one of the prisoners - Erwin, his German friend, also loved this girl for a long time. Franek joins the communists in the illusory hope of outsmarting the system.
When an out-of-work Chicagoan travels west as a hobo on a freight train, he finds himself falsely accused of murder.
In the wild times of the Second World War, Blanka marries political grandee Pavle, who is shortly afterwards sent to Goli Otok as a political prisoner. Blanka has enthusiasm for photography, becomes independent and opens a studio of photography with Laco. But soon she realizes that her business partner is an impostor. Pavle returns from prison, but their relationship, despite awareness of the political interference in their intimate sphere, imbues the bitter chill and misunderstanding. Blanka tries to drown her endless problems in alcohol and seduce her only male friend, but her last rescue, the thread of love, is being interrupted as well. Is every love of Blanka Kolak sentenced to death, is love possible at all, is worth living without it?
Damascus, Oregon, United States. Julie Keith finds a baffling message hidden in a pack of decorative items, a desperate plea for help, written by someone imprisoned in a Chinese labor camp called Masanjia…
The story of Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) and his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, published in Paris in 1973, which forever shook the very foundations of communist ideology.
Depicts life in the Solovki prison camp as a vacation at a holiday resort, pointing at the authorities’ efforts to humanise the re-education of criminals via an aesthetics of normalcy.