Rosewater — the directorial debut from Jon Stewart — is not a Canadian film. However, Rosewater, now in theatres in the United States, has a few connections to Canada.
We have previously spotlighted Maziar Bahari and his Canadian past. Bahari studied at Concordia University in Canada and made his first film.
Jon Stewart visits Toronto for his TIFF debut
Maziar Bahari has a Canadian connection
2014 TIFF releases Canadian content list
Jason Jones plays himself in the film as they recreate the interview that, in part, sparked the arrest and torture of Bahari. Jones interviewed Bahari in Iran before the 2009 Iranian election.
Stewart, as the director of the film and host/executive producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, gives us an insight into how the segments are done. We see Jones set up the terrorist question and then ask Bahari on camera "Are you a terrorist?"
Too bad that Bahari's torturers couldn't see that footage from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Then again, one of the points in the film is that the torturers don't understand the humor in the program.
We see various elements of "decadence" in Bahari's life. One is receiving a Leonard Cohen album I'm Your Man. The song Everybody Knows from that album plays while Bahari is being handed the album.
I'm Your Man came out in 1988 when Bahari was 21, the same year he moved to Canada to study at Concordia University.
Later in the film, we see Bahari dancing in prison to the great Leonard Cohen song Dance Me to the End of Love.
Everybody Knows is a popular song in film soundtracks, including Pump Up the Volume and Exotica, the Canadian film from Atom Egoyan.
The use and context of using Dance Me to the End of Love as a crescendo point reminded me a little of when Sarah Polley uses the Cohen song Take This Waltz in the film of the same name.
Rosewater played at the Toronto International Film Festival, forcing Stewart to run a rerun of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart for the screening.
Jian Ghomeshi (yes that Jian Ghomeshi) did a 70-minute interview with Jon Stewart about Rosewater during TIFF 2014. The interview could only be heard in Canada until the film opened.
Here is the link to that interview.
I have not been able to get the interview to play so far, but hopefully you can.
If you don't choose to listen to the interview based on what we've learned about Ghomeshi, we can understand that. Having a link to the interview should not in any way be construed as an endorsement of what Ghomeshi has been accused of doing.
Quite frankly, if ¼ of the allegations are true, he deserved to be fired, at a minimum. He has been hiding under the BDSM label, but based on the accusations of what we've heard, the label does not fit that behavior. This isn't about sex, but about violence.
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We will have more on the world of film this week. On Tuesday, we will look at the films from the 2014 Windsor International Film Festival. On Wednesday, we get insight into Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin.
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video credit: Rosewater film
Twitter capture: @jianghomeshi
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