THE film premiere of Iconography: Mungal Patasar will take place today at Queen’s Hall, St Ann's. The film is the second in the series by Pomegranate Studios, and is directed by Mikhail Gibbings and Teneka Mohammed.
Gibbings said the film series was a historical and archival one which tells the stories of older Trinidadians through their own voices, rather than through posthumous look-backs. The first film featured Roy Cape.
“The main selecting factor with the people we approach are that (the material) existed because there was widespread access to video archival material." He said the filmmakers would know their names, "and what they’ve done, to a certain extent, musically and creatively, but we don’t necessarily know them as people.”
Mohammed said he felt it was important to talk to Patasar because the entire crew involved in the film grew up listening to his music.
[caption id="attachment_1072098" align="alignnone" width="768"] Teneka Mohammed (right) looks on as crew member Aviel Scanterbury interviews Mungal Patasar's daughter Sharda - Photo courtesy Mikhail Gibbings[/caption]
“I’m a musician before I’m anything else, and the way I learned to play guitar was sitting in my room listening to Mungal Patasar and playing back his sitar lines on my guitar when I was six or seven.
"So the fact that we now get to sit in a room in his house and have him tell us all his amazing musical stories, it feels like a full-circle sort of thing.
“Filming was a really special experience where we got to spend time with this person who for us was this unreachable, influencing talent, who we didn’t really understand the concept of, because sitar is such an obscure instrument in our current culture, and he’s someone who drove that instrument when nobody was even looking out for what sitar was doing in Trinidad and Tobago.”
Gibbings said there wasn’t much recorded material about Patasar available to the public, even though he is an inextricable part of TT’s culture.
“Everyone knows the name, everyone knows (his tune) Dreadlocks when they hear that first note, but maybe they don’t know where he came from, maybe they don’t know where those first few notes even started. And so it feels really nice that we get to tell that story for the first time.”
[caption id="attachment_1072097" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Filmmaker Mikhail Gibbings at Tunapuna Tipica Steel Orchestra - Photo courtesy Teneka Mohammed[/caption]
He said Patasar’s wife, Roshni, was very welcoming and went above and beyond to accommodate them.
“She gave us such a large amount of archival material, she was one of the key people behind this. We probably wouldn’t have been able to do this documentary without her.”
Gibbings said along with the Pastasars, the surviving members of the band Pantar would be at the premiere, as well as co-founder Harold Headley, who he said was an under-recognised but completely foundational part of TT pan.
“A large part of the reason we wanted to do Pantar as part of this project is that a lot of the band members a
