Washington Post
Washington, DC, USA - An enormous poster of the movie “Casablanca” looms over a desk as film producers Kim Johnson and Jean Michel Gilbert speak, via Skype, from Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago. The poster does not suggest any particular passion for Humphrey Bogart. Rather, it is a sly reference to the history of the steel pan, also known as the steel drum, the instrument invented on the island of Trinidad, and the subject of a 2014 film produced by Gilbert and Johnson.
According to them, the steel pan bands of the 1940s and 1950s took their names from popular movies of the day. “Casablanca was one of the greatest early bands,” says Johnson, a native Trinidadian and a leading scholar of the history of steel pan music.
That music is the subject of “PAN! Our Music Odyssey,” a docudrama they produced with Barthélémy Fougea. The film will screen June 14 at the AFI Silver Theatre as part of the 2015 DC Caribbean FilmFest, running June 12-14.
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