Films about the Gulag

Vadim Uporov is desperate to escape from the Gulag. He tries and tries - again and again...

Peter Weir's follow-up to Master & Commander (2003) is the stark & brilliant The Way Back, which takes on the theme of man's struggle for freedom. At the dawn of WWII, several men escape from a Russian gulag. The film details their perilous & uncertain journey to freedom, as they cross deserts, mountains, & several nations.

The German soldier Clemens Forel - determined to be reunited with his beloved family - makes a dramatic escape through bitter cold winters, desolate landscapes, and life threatening ventures from a Siberian labor camp after World War II. 8000 miles and three endless years of uncertainty later, he is finally about to reach his destination...An edge of your seat drama that celebrates the power of the human spirit and the force of will, while inspired and impowered by love.

June 1946: Stalin invites Russian emigres to return to the motherland. It's a trap: when a ship-load from France arrives in Odessa, only a physician and his family are spared execution or prison. He and his French wife (her passport ripped up) are sent to Kiev. She wants to return to France immediately; he knows that they are captives and must watch every step.

The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.

All eyes focus on the Vatican, watching for the traditional puffs of white smoke that signal the election of the next Pope. This time much more is at stake. The new pontiff may be the only person who can bring peace to a world on the brink of nuclear nightmare.

When his family moves from their home in Berlin to a strange new house in Poland, young Bruno befriends Shmuel, a boy who lives on the other side of the fence where everyone seems to be wearing striped pajamas. Unaware of Shmuel's fate as a Jewish prisoner or the role his own Nazi father plays in his imprisonment, Bruno embarks on a dangerous journey inside the camp's walls.

June 14, 1941, 3 a.m. Over 40000 people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are deported by Soviets to Siberia. Among them is a philosophy student Erna, a happily married mother of a little girl. Separated from her husband Erna and her daughter are dispatched together with other women and children to remote Siberian territories. Despite hunger, fear and brutal humiliation Erna never in next fifteen years loses her sense of freedom and hope of returning to homeland. The story is inspired by real events.

Based on the true story, international historical project “Sobibor” is dedicated to the heroism of the Soviet o cer Alexander Pechersky. During the great Patriotic war, being in a Nazi concentration camp Sobibor he managed to do the impossible — for only three weeks to organize a revolt and mass escape of the prisoners. Part of the escapees were caught and shot, and the rest led by Pechersky managed to escape and joined the partisans.

Set in the late 1940s, the film concerns the treatment of suspect "bourgeois elements", a professor, a saxophonist, and a milkman, who are put to work in a junkyard for rehabilitation.

In the small town of Kandalaksha, Petya lives out a fantasy life as a traffic cop. He has a holster, a wooden gun, and the locals humor him by following his "orders." When a convict escapes from a nearby prison, Petya joins the manhunt as any good officer would.

The true story of an unlikely romance in a Soviet labor camp.

A touching story of an Italian book seller of Jewish ancestry who lives in his own little fairy tale. His creative and happy life would come to an abrupt halt when his entire family is deported to a concentration camp during World War II. While locked up he tries to convince his son that the whole thing is just a game.

Jamie Graham, a privileged English boy, is living in Shanghai when the Japanese invade and force all foreigners into prison camps. Jamie is captured with an American sailor named Basie, who looks out for him while they are in the camp together. Even though he is separated from his parents and in a hostile environment, Jamie maintains his dignity and youthful spirits, providing a beacon of hope for the others held captive with him.

The wife of the aircraft designer, Olga Pavlova, the head of the Moscow garment factory, and the wife of the director of the opera house, the famous Soviet opera singer Sofia Ter-Ashaturova, meet in the prison car of the train. Together they will go to Akmola camp of the wives of traitors of the Motherland, where there will be representatives of the most different strata of the population. Heroes will need strength of spirit and endurance to pass all the terrible ordeals on their way and remain human.

A young woman doctor discovers something sinister going on in her hospital. Relatively healthy patients are having 'complications' during simple operations and ending up in comas. The patients are then shipped off to an institute that looks after them. The young doctor suspects there is more to this than meets the eye.

Rainy summer evening... Young people are arriving at the new trendy club named Phobos which is still under construction. Or re-construction - since it's a former bomb shelter which is reconstructed to become a club. At first, the party sees nothing wrong, but soon the bunker doors turn out to be locked, and the teenagers get trapped underground without light and communication. At first, all of them are joking and do not realize how dangerous their situation is. Then they get frightened. All of them will need to cope with their fears before the bunker will let them free.

Siberia 1953: Ilsa is now working in a Gulag prison camp. Her mission is to "retrain the minds" of those who don't agree with the communists.

The historical drama set during the Second World War centres on three people whose paths cross: a Russian aristocratic emigrant and member of the French resistance, a French collaborator and a high-ranking German SS officer.

The true story of Ivan Sanchin, the KGB officer who was Stalin's private film projectionist from 1939 until the dictator's death. Told from Sanchin's view, the sympathetic but tragically flawed hero maintains unwavering faith in his "Master" despite the arrest of his neighbors and his involvement with their daughter, his wife's affair with the chilling State Security chief Lavrentii Beria and her tragic decline, and the deadly political machinations within the Kremlin he witnesses firsthand. Written by Martin H. Booda

A victim from World War II's "Death Railway" sets out to find those responsible for his torture. A true story.

Beginning of WWII. Zinaida, a Russian woman, is taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp together with several other women. She is imprisoned with her baby son, Gena, who is learning to walk and takes his first steps in the snow, in the concentration camp. They spend a few years together in the camp until they are separated, first within Auschwitz itself, then, for good, when the Germans are losing the war and decide to evacuate.

A Nazi doctor, along with the Sonderkomando Jews – who are forced to work in the crematoria of Auschwitz against their fellow-Jews – find themselves in a moral grey zone.

“The Soviet Story” is a story of an Allied power, which helped the Nazis to fight Jews and which slaughtered its own people on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945. Its crimes were made taboo, and the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told. Until now...

The real-life story of Gisella Perl, a Jewish Hungarian doctor imprisoned in the notorious Auschwitz death camp of World War II.

After living a long and colorful life, Allan Karlsson finds himself stuck in a nursing home. On his 100th birthday, he leaps out a window and begins an unexpected journey.

Based on the true story of the "death match" where the Soviet team "Start" scored its second victory over the German team «Flakelf» on August 9, 1942

He considers himself a genius but the publishers refuse to print his works. He loves women but they don’t always understand him. Constantly without money and out of touch with reality. The elegant fop Daniil Yuvachov names himself Kharms- a name just as effective as his appearance. An habitué of unending literary get-togethers and a lover of scandal. Living in society he is completely separate from it. Kharms throws down a gauntlet to his time, audaciously hurling himself into the vortex of reality, just as vague and arbitrary, with the same contradictions, as represented by his spirit.

The story Jewish counterfeiter, Salomon Sorowitsch, coerced into assisting the Nazi operation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during World War II.

An Hungarian youth comes of age at Buchenwald during World War II. György Köves is 14, the son of a merchant who's sent to a forced labor camp. After his father's departure, György gets a job at a brickyard; his bus is stopped and its Jewish occupants sent to camps. There, György find camaraderie, suffering, cruelty, illness, and death. He hears advice on preserving one's dignity and self-esteem. He discovers hatred. If he does survive and returns to Budapest, what will he find? What is natural; what is it to be a Jew? Sepia, black and white, and color alternate to shade the mood.