Svět za vysokou zdí

French visual artist-director JR (co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary FACES PLACES with the legendary Agnès Varda) situates his latest social-art intervention in a Southern Californian supermax prison, where he has imagined an enormously ambitious collaboration with the facility’s inmates.

Part of a trilogy about the reality of living in a French prison.

San Quentin State Prison (SQ) is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated town of San Quentin in Marin County. San Quentin opened in July 1852, it is the oldest prison in California. The state's only death row for male inmates, the largest in the United States, is located at the prison. It has a gas chamber, but since 1996, executions at the prison have been carried out by lethal injection, though the prison has not performed an execution since 2006.

Emperors of Nothing is an unprecedented immersion within Forest, a prison in Brussels notorious for its inhumane incarceration conditions, bearing witness to how the human spirit resists or submits to this harsh world. Deeply personal and candid moments shared with inmates and wardens alike, those who have forfeited or devoted their lives to prison, expose universal truths of what it means to be "behind bars".

A group of men share a small space in a prison metal workshop in Botosani, Romania. When they’re not working, they animatedly discuss religion and hypocrisy, lament during tea that they don’t have onions for sausage, or joke and sing.

In love with a man who wants to marry her after he returns from a trip to sea, chorus girl Angela Booth tries to quit her seamy job and become a model citizen. When her employer refuses to dissolve her contract, though, they quarrel and she accidentally hits him. He presses charges, claiming she hit him deliberately, and she is convicted and sent to prison. As her fiance is at sea and out of contact, she is terrified he will think she has jilted him when she does not keep a New Year's date. A kindly old convict, Gran', notorious as a prison-breaker, agrees to engineer an escape for Angela...

A weak con man panics when he learns he's going to prison for fraud. He hires a mysterious martial arts guru who helps transform him into a martial arts expert who can fight off inmates who want to hurt or love him.

Libby Parsons, wrongly convicted for her husband Nick's murder, thinks he is still alive and wants to settle the score and find their son. As she has been tried for the crime, she cannot be re-prosecuted if she finds and kills Nick.

Four female convicts break out of prison, and during their escape they take hostage a bus full of young female tennis players. They drive the bus to the house of the judge who originally sent them to prison, where-since this is after all a women-in-prison picture-the hostages undergo various forms of physical and sexual abuse in various degrees of nudity.