Synopsis

The movie tells the story of rock singer Pink who is sitting in his hotel room in Los Angeles, burnt out from the music business and only able to perform on stage with the help of drugs. Based on the 1979 double album The Wall by Pink Floyd, the film begins in Pink's youth where he is crushed by the love of his mother. Several years later he is punished by the teachers in school because he is starting to write poems. Slowly he begins to build a wall around himself to be protected from the world outside. The film shows all this in massive and epic pictures until the very end where he tears down the wall and breaks free. The film contains fifteen minutes of elaborate animation sequences by the political cartoonist and illustrator Gerald Scarfe, part of which depict a nightmarish vision of the German bombing campaign over the United Kingdom during World War II set to the song Goodbye Blue Sky.

 

Alan Parker

Sir Alan William Parker was born into a working class family in North London. He started out as a copywriter for advertising agencies in the 1960s and 1970s and later began to write his own television commercial scripts, and directed many award winning commercials. A Midnight Express (1978) is his breakthrough film. It was a gritty film set in a Turkish prison, which was lauded by critics and which ended up earning Parker a number of Oscar nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture. He was later nominated for Best Director for Mississippi Burning (1988). He has directed a number of one-off musicals including Bugsy Malone (1976), Fame (1980), Pink Floyd The Wall (1982), The Commitments (1991) and Evita (1996).