Papillon (2017)

This is a remake of a 1973 movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, but based on a biographical novel which was published in 1969.  Papillon (played by Charlie Hunnam) is a nickname for a flamboyant Paris thief, who spends a lot of time in Moulin Rouge sorts of places with women of ill repute.  He is arrested for a murder which he definitely did not commit and sentenced to hard labor in a penal colony in French Guyana, never to return to France.  The time in roughly between WWI and WWII.  In retrospect, France should have hung on to some of these scrappy men for what was to come.  Once on the transport boat, he meets Dega (played by the now well known Rami Malek), a counterfeiter who is wealthy, weak, and convinced that his wife will be handling his appeal and that he will soon be released.  Suffice it to say that doewn't happen, the two men get into a fair amount of trouble along the way, the conditions are brutal, but in the worst of all possible places, Papillon does finally escape, and much later, he writes a book detailing the inhuman conditions of their treatment and the cruelty of their captors.