An impassioned depiction of life in a Turkish prison by Yilmaz Gü;ney,the late activist film director who himself spent twelve years as apolitical prisoner, writing and supervising his masterpiece Yol (1982)from his prison cell. The Wall, made in France, was completed threeyears after Gü;ney's escape and a year before his death in 1984.Whereas in Yol, life in the ancient patriarchal Turkish social systembecame a metaphor for prison, in The Wall, prison is clearly a metaphorfor Turkey under military rule, where life, however distorted, goes onin all its fullness and strangeness. In this enclosed system, wherewomen and men are segregated but political prisoners are cast in withviolent felons, all are created disenfranchised, but some more thanothers. Gü;ney focuses on the most powerless group, teenage boys,who are prey to the sexual whims and taunts of guards and prisoners; soimpotent that, when they pray, they ask God not for freedom but for abetter prison. The revolt of the children is based on a 1976 uprising inan Ankara prison which was brutally suppressed.