Sun Ra: Do the Impossible

  • Introduction

    Ayize Jama-Everett is an Afrofuturist novelist, filmmaker, educator, and therapist weaving speculative storytelling, community healing, and sacred inquiry across literature, film, pedagogy, and psychedelic-informed practice rooted in justice, ritual, and imagination.

Jazz pianist, early synthesizer adopter, bandleader, record-label president, interplanetary ambassador: Sun Ra was all of these things and more. His ever-evolving Arkestra ensemble made some of the boldest, most exciting experimental jazz of the mid-twentieth century and beyond. Filmmaker Christine Turner chronicles how Sun Ra turned his truly out-of-this-world persona into something bigger than an alter ego and put forth a philosophy that “space is the place” to make people rethink everything they knew about race, class, social norms, and music as a medium to blow minds. It’s a portrait of an artist as a cultural astronaut, boldly going where no one has gone before or since. 

David Fear
FILM DETAILS 
Cinematographer
  • Othello Banaci
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 84 mins
Source
  • Firelight Media

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