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.
Up Next in Afrofuturism
-
Born in Flames
Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1983 • United States
Starring Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean SatterfieldThe 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...
-
Ornette: Made in America
Directed by Shirley Clarke • 1985 • United States
Starring Ornette ColemanThis 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...
-
Welcome II the Terrordome
Directed by Ngozi Onwurah • 1995 • United Kingdom
Starring Suzette Llewellyn, Saffron Burrows, Felix JosephNgozi Onwurah’s radically ahead-of-its-time Afrofuturist vision WELCOME II THE TERRORDOME made history as the first theatrically distributed British feature directed by a Black woman. Neve...