Some documentaries explain their subjects. Others let their aura do the talking.
Sun Ra: Do the Impossible, directed by Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Christine Turner, firmly belongs to the latter camp. And that feels entirely appropriate for a figure who defied tidy definitions: composer, bandleader, philosopher, and mythmaker who fused cosmic symbolism, ancient Egyptian imagery, and interstellar imagination.
Turner’s elegantly distilled portrait, which debuted at Tribeca Festival last year and is now streaming as part of PBS’s American Masters, reframes Sun Ra not as an eccentric footnote in avant-garde jazz but as a visionary music polymath and foundational architect of Afrofuturism—whose influence now pulses through fashion, art, and sound with renewed urgency.
Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham in 1914, Sun Ra would go on to self-produce more than 200 albums and stretch jazz into realms most listeners had never imagined. His career spanned more than five decades, from swing and bebop in the late 1930s to radical explorations in free jazz and electronic music from the ’60s through the ’80s. (He died in 1993.) Turner assembles a kaleidoscope of archival footage, performance clips, still photography, and interviews with his Arkestra members and contemporary thinkers who map Sun Ra’s long cultural afterlife.
“People aren’t just a little bit into Sun Ra, if they’re into Sun Ra,” the San Francisco–based filmmaker chuckles. “People who are really drawn to him talk about how he’s his authentic self. He was fearless in how he presented himself, and I think for that reason he has often attracted other outsiders.”
Indeed, his imprint ripples outward, from the interstellar swagger of OutKast and the android futurism of Janelle Monáe to the mystical poise of Erykah Badu and the sculptural, otherworldly aesthetics of Solange, Grace Wales Bonner, and Pharrell Williams. Each channels Sun Ra’s radical reframing of Black identity, his insistence on myth as survival, and his refusal to be confined by earthly expectations—a philosophy embodied when he famously claimed he visited Saturn, a way of imagining Black existence beyond the limitations of the terrestrial world.
