From Germantown to Saturn and back: a new Sun Ra documentary lands in Philly

While working on her new documentary about composer, pianist, and poet Sun Ra, Christine Turner kept words of wisdom from the visionary bandleader close at hand.

“I kept these quotes on my wall above my desk,” said the filmmaker, speaking via Zoom from her home in San Francisco. “They’re from an Arkestra newspaper I picked up at one of their shows a few years ago.”

One Sun Ra self-help tip was particularly valuable.

“The possible has been tried and failed,” it reads. “Now it’s time to try the impossible.”

That thought is echoed in the title of her film Sun Ra: Do the Impossible about the Birmingham, Ala.-born Renaissance man who, along with his band, lived in a house on Morton Street in Germantown in Philadelphia, from the late 1960s until close to the time of his death in 1993.

“But also for me personally, the challenge of taking on a task that” — she says laughing at the enormity of it all — “could at times seem impossible!”

That’s because there’s so much Sun Ra to consider in her briskly paced, thoroughly researched 85-minute movie.

It reaches back to the “transmolecularization” that the musical savant born Herman Poole Blount, known as “Sonny,” claimed to have experienced in 1936. He was, he said, teleported to Saturn and returned to Earth with a musical mission to bring peace and understanding to the world.

Sun Ra’s music encompasses the entire history of jazz — from its New Orleans beginnings to out-there experimentation with electronic instruments, King Britt, Philadelphia DJ-producer-turned Blacktronika professor at the University of California San Diego, explains in the film. Other Philadelphians who offer analysis include poet-musician-activist Moor Mother and critic and WRTI-FM (90.1) editorial director Nate Chinen.

Starting in the 1950s — decades before DIY punks got the idea — Sun Ra released hundreds of self-made recordings that ranged from old-fashioned swing to bleeding-edge avant garde.

He created an enormous body of work, much of it recorded with famed band members like John Gilmore, June Tyson, and Marshall Allen, the now 101-year-old maestro who has continued to travel the spaceways and led the Sun Ra Arkestra in the 32 years since its founder’s death.

“It’s a vast catalog that can be deeply intimidating,” said Turner, who has shown her films at BlackStar five times before, starting with Homegoings, her 2013 feature-length debut about a Black funeral director in Alabama. It won the festival’s award for best documentary.

She’ll be back this year attending her film’s screening at the Wilma Theater at 2 p.m. on Saturday, as will Allen, whom she interviewed in 2023 at the Morton Street house that Sun Ra famously bought from Allen’s father for $1.

Sun Ra: Do the Impossible arrives at a time when Sun Ra’s presence is larger than ever.

Since 2023, the Red Hot organization has released five Sun Ra tribute albums, including efforts curated by Meshell Ndgeocello and Kronos Quartet. Sun Ra’s oeuvre was central to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt” exhibit, and his images are featured prominently at Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art’s “Entryways: Xenobia Bailey” exhibit.

He’s an acknowledged influence on contemporary artists like Thundercat, Flying Lotus, and André 3000, who was a guest at Allen’s 101st birthday party at Solar Myth.

» READ MORE: Marshall Allen turned 101. And André 3000 was invited to the cosmic party in South Philly.

Allen continues to perform with the Arkestra and has released two albums under his own name this year. He is coproducer, along with his son Ronnie Boyd, of another doc titled Sun Ra: Door to the Cosmos, due in 2026.

That film and Do the Impossible add to Sun Ra film library, which includes the 1972 Ra-written Space Is the Place and Philly filmmaker Robert Mugge’s 1980 Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise.

Turner’s film refers to Sun Ra, as “the Godfather of Afrofuturism,” a term coined the year he died. His centrality to contemporary Black culture was one reason the filmmaker was eager to take on the project when Firelight Films’ Stanley Nelson offered it to her.

“I leapt at the opportunity,” she said.

She’s didn’t know Sun Ra’s music all that well, but “I understood his cultural importance and wanted to learn more. And it seemed like the right time for a reappraisal.”

While Sun Ra’s musical genius is widely acknowledged, he’s also frequently viewed as a curiosity who dressed up his band as interstellar superheroes. The film includes a clip with a TV interviewer who barely can keep from giggling as Sun Ra explains that he really is an angel from Saturn.

Turner’s film portrays him as an artist-as-autodidact who understood the power of myth and believed Black Americans needed to put faith in their imaginations if they hoped to do the impossible and transcend their earthly plight.

“It’s an opportunity for people who might have overlooked him in the past, to take a closer listen,” she said. “I think there is a way that he’s been dismissed as a kooky person, and the film seeks to reframe him as a thinker and an intellectual.”

Sun Ra’s continued presence in the culture grows, Turner said, in part because, “the music lives on, and the Arkestra continues to play. And that helps further his legacy.

“I also think that as a culture, we’re just catching up with a lot of the ideas and the music that was so ahead of its time. He’s become an icon of Afrofuturism, and I think that is resonating with people because we’re deeply in need of new ideas and radically imagining another kind of future. And I think people are really hungering for that.”

Catch this new documentary on the legendary composer, pianist, and poet Sun Ra during the BlackStar Film Festival.

📍 In-person screening: Aug. 2, 2 p.m., Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St., 💻 Virtual streaming: Available for 48 hours starting Saturday at 3:30 p.m., 🌐 More info: BlackStarFest.org.