This is an embittered and impassioned depiction of life in a Turkish prison by Yilmaz Guney, an activist film director who himself spent twelve years as a political prisoner (he wrote and supervised his masterpiece, the 1982 film Yol, from his prison cell). The Wall was made in France, completed three years after Guney's escape and a year before his death in 1984. Whereas in Yol, life in the ancient, patriarchal Turkish social system became a metaphor for prison, in The Wall prison is clearly a metaphor for Turkey, a country under military rule where life, however distorted, goes on in all its fullness and strangeness. In this enclosed system, where the women and the men are segregated (but political prisoners are cast in with violent felons), a system in which all are created disenfranchized, but some more than others, Guney focuses on the most powerless group of all: teenage boys, who are prey to the sexual whims of guards and the sadistic taunts of marauding male prisoners. Their impotence is so ingrained that, when these boys pray, they ask God not for freedom but for a better prison. The revolt of the children depicted here is based on an actual uprising which was brutally suppressed in an Ankara prison in 1976.