The Wall

THE WALL is an unceasingly brutal film about life in a Turkish prison. Director Yilmaz Guney, who died in 1984, served three separate jail sentences (one for murder) before finally escaping in 1981. Working from this firsthand experience in France (in an abbey converted to a jail for the production), Guney brings to the screen a film that stands up defiantly and violently for the rights of the imprisoned. The prison depicted here is a re-creation of the one in Ankara, Turkey, that was the sight of an inmate rebellion in 1976. It segregates men, women, and children but has no policy of separating violent offenders from political dissidents. In an indictment of the b...