One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1970)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's dramatization of his own experience inside the Soviet Gulag system under the guise of fictional character Ivan Denisovich.

This bleak vision takes you from waking up right through to going to bed after a full day of hard labor.

While this drama is bleak and depressing as it is, it is worth remembering that this is as good as it got - this is a good day at a properly run gulag - bad days would involve beatings, rapes, sadistic torture, and arbitrary executions... and the women got it worse.