TV & VIDEO - Dec. 18, 1987

Dramatic footage taken inside a Soviet labor camp by France’s Antenne-2 channel gave the West its first authorized glimpse into the Gulag penal system. The 75-minute film, televised on the human-rights program “Resistances,” Thursday night, showed life inside a camp 125 miles southeast of Moscow. Permission was unexpectedly granted two weeks ago via the Soviet Novosti news agency during the camera crew’s three-week visit to the Soviet Union. Director Jean-Jacques Le Garrec told Reuters that he had been struck by the similarities with the film version of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”