The Queens Museum’s summertime staple, Passport Thursdays: International Dance, Music, and Film Series, returns for another exciting season featuring some of the many international locales that fuel Queens’ cultural and artistic vitality. This year’s adventure includes stops in the Caribbean, Taiwan, India, Colombia, Korea, and South Africa. So leave your baggage at home and bring a picnic blanket out to Flushing Meadows Corona Park for an evening in the shadow of the majestic Unisphere. There will be free artmaking workshops for families before the films start, our galleries and café will remain open until 8pm, and we won’t let a little rain spoil the fun, we’ll just move the whole event indoors.

And if coming to the Park is a little out of the way, this year we are partnering with the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance to bring three of the films out to Rockaway. Destination Rockaway: Passport International Film Series will present three selections from Passport Thursdays in the Rockaway Community Garden. So whether you prefer the beach or the park, we hope you’ll join us on our journey of global sights and sounds.

Music: The Braata Folk Singers are proud ambassadors of and the foremost authority on Jamaican and Caribbean folk music performance in the United States. The group has established  itself among Jamaicans and others in the wider Caribbean Diaspora for its unique and dynamic presentation of the region’s folk music, combining new choral arrangements with intricate choreography, design elements, and costume. The result is a theatrical presentation best described  as "choral theater.”

Film: Pan! Our Music Odyssey (Jérôme Guiot, T&T, 2014, 80min, English, French, Japanese with Eng ST)

Pan! Our Music Odyssey is the story of the national instrument of T+T, the only new acoustic musical instrument invented in the twentieth century. The film dramatises the 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.

Co-presented with caribBEING and Indo Caribbean Alliance.

Passport Thursdays and Destination Rockaway: Passport International Film Series are presented by TD Bank. 

Additional support provided by Nexon,  Taipei Cultural Center of TECO in New York, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.