John Coney’s Space Is the Place is, as Steve Seid wrote, “an otherworldly frolic combining intergalactic bebop with riffs on black liberation . . . [taking] to heart Sun Ra’s cosmic philosophy of music as a liberating force.” Inspired by Sun Ra’s 1971 UC Berkeley course The Black Man in the Cosmos and filmed in Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, and Richmond, the film stars Sun Ra, who, accompanied by the music of his Intergalactic Myth-Science Solar Arkestra, travels through time and space—including Chicago in the 1940s and Oakland in the 1970s—on a mission to free Black consciousness from psychic shackles.