Directed by John Coney • 1974 • United States
Starring Sun Ra, Barbara Deloney, Raymond Johnson
Avant-jazz mystic Sun Ra brought his pioneering Afrofuturist vision to the screen with this film version of his concept album. It’s a wild, kaleidoscopic whirl of science fiction, sharp social commentary, goofy pseudo-blaxploitation stylistics, and thrilling concert performance, in which the pharaonic Ra and his Arkestra lead an intergalactic movement to resettle the Black race on their utopian space colony.
Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1983 • United States
Starring Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean Satterfield
The film that rocked the foundations of the 1980s underground, this postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a social-democratic cultural revolution. W...
Directed by John Sayles • 1984 • United States
Starring Joe Morton, Daryl Edwards, Steve James
In John Sayles’s witty urban spin on the runaway-slave narrative, a mute extraterrestrial (Joe Morton, in a remarkably expressive performance) crash-lands in Harlem after a spaceship accident and finds...
Directed by Shirley Clarke • 1985 • United States
Starring Ornette Coleman
This freewheeling documentary captures Ornette Coleman’s evolution over three decades. Documentary footage, dramatic scenes, and some of the first music-video-style segments ever made chronicle his boyhood in segregated T...
