Sun Ra and his Solar Myth Arkestra return to Earth after several years in space. Ra proclaims himself “the alter-destiny”, meets with inner-city youths and battles with the devil himself to save the black race.

Vincent Canby, The New York Times
“A gloriously eccentric and free-form fantasia… less a narrative film than a cosmic manifesto, pulsing with Sun Ra’s boundless imagination.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
“One of the most radical works in American independent cinema—an Afrofuturist vision that uses science fiction, music, and myth to imagine liberation itself.”

Preceded by

The Cry of Jazz
1959 · USA · 34 min

Filmed in Chicago and completed in 1959, The Cry of Jazz is filmmaker, composer, and arranger Edward O. Bland’s polemical essay on the politics of music and race—a forecast of what he termed “the death of jazz.” A landmark of Black cinema that eerily anticipates the civil unrest of later decades, the film also features the only known footage of Sun Ra from his Chicago years, with striking black-and-white performances by tenor saxophonist John Gilmore and the Arkestra in Windy City nightclubs.