Pan! Our Music Odyssey is the story of the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago, the only new acoustic musical instrument invented in the twentieth century. The film boldly dramatises the almost mythical invention of pan in the 1940s, and then surges forward to tell the stories of people from all over the world—T+T, France, Japan, the USA—who have staked everything on their love of the instrument, and whose passion and daring draw them each year to the “world championships” of steelband, Panorama. Written by Kim Johnson, T+T’s foremost pan writer and researcher, Pan! is interlaced with dramatic re-enactments of the rags-to-riches tale of the steelband movement, which was born into poverty and violence but climbed to the highest levels of social and artistic acceptance without losing its life-or-death urgency. The result is an extraordinary global human adventure, as rousing and life-affirming as any great pan symphony.
