Roger Waters Premieres The Wall at Toronto Film Festival

Hamptonite and Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters premiered his new film Roger Waters: The Wall at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, September 6.

The movie, by Waters and Sean Evans, chronicles his epic world concert tour The Wall Live, during which he performed Pink Floyd’s masterful 1979 album The Wall in its entirety for the first time since his 1990 “Live in Berlin” concert. Called [in The Daily Mail] one of the “most ambitious and complex rock shows ever staged,” the sold out tour went on for three years, from 2010–2013, it cost some $60 million to produce and is credit with being the As of 2013, the tour holds the highest grossing tour for a solo musician, surpassing fellow Hamptonite Madonna, who held the record before 2013.

Speaking at the premiere on Saturday, which was also his 71st birthday, Waters said the movie was more than a concert documentary. “It’s a protest movie,” Waters explained.

The 133-minute film features all 26 songs from The Wall, but Waters also uses the platform to send out a powerful anti-war message through footage of him visiting various war memorials and cemeteries. Among them, the rock icon visits the grave of his grandfather, who died in World War I, and the battlefield where his father was killed in 1944 while fighting in World War II.

The Wall, in all its incarnations—including the 1982 live-action/animation movie starring Bob Geldof—has always spoke to the horrors of war, and Waters has been quite direct in admonishing the growth of our military-industrial complex, the painful cost of using violence to solve problems and the madness of sacrificing so many lives in the process.

At its TIFF premiere, the film received a standing ovation from fans and the audience sang “Happy Birthday” to Waters when he appeared onstage, but as of Tuesday, September 9, Roger Waters: The Wall had yet to find a distributor.

Featured photo courtesy of Nicolás Lope de Barrios (Flickr Creative Commons: flickr.com/photos/nico_/6999724096/)