Panman, the new feature-length dramatic film about a steelpan soloist and composer struggling to make his mark with pan in St Maarten, is making the rounds of US film festivals starting in a few days.
Many writers and actors might have such dreams but few managed to translate their dreams into reality. Valz, that’s Sir Ian Valz, knighted in 2006 by the Dutch Queen for his services to Dutch culture as one of the most successful playwrights, actors, and radio personalities in the Dutch St Maarten where Valz emigrated in 1984.
But it wasn’t about Dutch culture that Valz envisioned his movie. ’I wanted to do a film about the struggles of a Caribbean artist and pan,’ he noted.
Valz told the BBC last fall, ’It’s about a steel pan player who is trying to promote steel pan on the island. He’s a sort of an icon on the island but he hasn’t been very successful in getting the youth involved in ’Pan’ and this on an island where the steel pan was not really a priority’ The pannist Harry Daniel is dedicated to his art. In the film he wins a solo pan contest in Trinidad only to return to St Maarten to struggle to support himself with his art. He is so dedicated to pan that his marriage and family suffer as does his relationship with his best student. This is a film that doesn’t sugar-coat the complex lives and emotions of the main characters who are exposed to drugs and desires and make various compromises often with tragic consequences.
Pan was always part of Valz’s own life. ’I grew up hearing the Chronicle Steel Orchestra in Guyana, one of the biggest in the region. In fact I played football as a youth briefly for a club called Campton
where the orchestra practised and I was impressed by the power and beauty of the steelpan. Also, I worked with Pan Players on St Maarten for many shows and I performed John Agards epic poem Man To Pan at a special concert in St Maarten. I felt compelled in a way to make a play/ film about Pan.’
Indeed, for the film, Valz took lessons and learned to play pan as part of his role.
Originally done as a play titled Rhythm of the Palms it took 15 years to bring to the big screen. Valz felt that it would work not just as a play but also as a film. But taking a script from play to film was a challenge but nothing to the major challenge. The toughest challenge wasn’t the writing or the filming. ’No,’ Valz declared. ’The hardest thing to do was raise the money to finish the film.’ This was not an action film funded by Hollywood just doing location shots in the Caribbean with known stars but a film that focused on Caribbean roots like The Harder They Come and therefore funding was much more difficult. But several local funding sources did help bring the film to fruition and it gave a unique chance for many local actors and performers to appear in a feature film. Valz’s dream turned into a first, the first international film shot in Dutch St Maarten.
The director Sandy Burger was a young graduate of the Dutch Film Academy and has quickly becoming a phenomenon, directing a well-received series of documentaries and dramatic films in the last several years.
’Sander Burger and I hit it off immediately.’ Valz commented. ’We both had the same vision about how we wanted the film to look. I trusted him. My co-producer Norman de Palm made a great choice in choosing Sander to direct this film.’ After years of struggle, the film premiered in St Maarten in December of last year to what was clearly red carpet treatment.
But Valz is no one-hit wonder. He is one of the Caribbean’s most dedicated and experienced theatre professionals. He grew up in Guyana and early on became involved in theatre and went on to study and work with the Theatre Guild of Guyana and pursue acting and directing workshops in Jamaica.
He has written over a dozen plays, acted in over 30 and directed over 60. His first play, House of Pressure, became a very successful radio serial in the early eighties in Guyana. When he moved to St Maarten, Valz was quickly central to the establishment of new adult and children’s theatre companies. His play, Masquerade, was nominated for the Guyana prize for literature, published in St Maarten, and has been performed in a number of countries, while another of his plays, Peacock Dance, was made into a TV movie in St Maarten in 2004.
Now Ian Valz is packing his bags to come to the United States, where the film he co-produced, starred in, and wrote the screenplay is being featured across the country in a series of film festivals.
Its American premiere will be on June 1 at the Brooklyn Film Festival to be quickly followed by appearances on June 7 at the Hollywood Black Film Festival and on June 15 at Yoshi’s Jazz Club in Oakland as part of the San Francisco Black Film Festival. These highly competitive festivals have the pick of hundreds if not thousands of films and Panman has already created quite a buzz by being chosen to star in so many festivals this summer. The film is scheduled to also be featured as the opening night feature of the Curacao Film Festival on June 25 and this fall will make its first official at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival.
Valz is looking now for a distributor and has plans for regular theatre distribution in the Caribbean after the summer round of festivals. Then there will be release on DVD and hopefully the soundtrack will be released on CD as the film features a wealth of St Maarten musicians: Tounka Brooks, Bonfire Band, Orange Grove and Konkie the Panman from Curacao. But for now it is one festival after another where he looks forward to the response which so far has been very positive, a strong step for Caribbean film making and Pan.
