Image credit: Leni Sinclair

‍

Join us for a Film Screening and Discussion of a new documentary about the legendary Sun Ra with Director & Producer Christine Turner. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Turner and Max Jefferson, a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at UC Berkeley.

‍

About the Film

‍

‍

‍

SUN RA: DO THE IMPOSSIBLE is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the visionary jazz musician, composer, and poet known as Sun Ra and the musical, historical, and philosophical currents that shaped him.

‍

Poet, philosopher, Egyptologist, bandleader. Jazz visionary Sun Ra was all of these – and more. With his ever-evolving band, the Sun Ra Arkestra, he produced more than 200 albums, stretching the boundaries of free-form jazz while weaving ancient Egypt, interstellar metaphors, and scientific musings into a singular musical and spiritual vision of Afrofuturism that continues to reverberate across generations. Director Christine Turner takes us on an illuminating journey through the life of this multi-faceted artist, gracefully balancing recollections from the Arkestra’s still-devout band members and dancers with insightful interviews from music scholars, and unforgettable film and performance footage of Sun Ra himself. The result is a portrait – informative, inspiring, and mind-bending – of a man whose audacious vision, otherworldly imagination, and uncompromising artistry helped shape not only the sound of jazz, but the cultural landscape of the 20th century and beyond.

‍

Watch the trailer HERE

‍

About the Speakers

‍

‍

‍

Christine Turner is a filmmaker whose portraits of artists, activists, and everyday people capture the beauty and struggle of life. Previously, her short documentary, The Barber of Little Rock (The New Yorker), about a local barber’s fight for a just economy, was nominated for Best Short Documentary at the 2024 Academy Awards. Her film J’Nai Bridges Unamplified, released in 2023, follows the titular opera singer as she takes the stage in “A Knee on the Neck,” a tribute to George Floyd (PBS/American Masters). Other notable work includes: Lynching Postcards: ‘Token of a Great Day’ (Paramount+), which was nominated for a Peabody and won an NAACP Image Award; Homegoings (PBS/POV), a critically-acclaimed portrait of a renowned Harlem funeral director; and the two artist profiles Betye Saar: Taking Care of Business (New York Times Op-Docs) and Paint & Pitchfork (The New Yorker). Learn more at christineturner.com. 

‍

‍

‍

Max Jefferson (she/hers) is a PhD candidate in Music at the University of California, Berkeley, in the field of Musicology, and a 2025 recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies. Her work, broadly, examines histories of Black music in which the narrative pen has been held by Black hands: insider stories.

‍

In her 2023 long review for The Opera Quarterly,“Hearing Real Magic in …Iphigenia” she addresses “a growing body of work that honors Blackness and those artists who know from experience the violence of hegemonic archetypes and traditions,” calling for scholarly recognition and attendant critical literatures for this artistic movement. Her forthcoming 2026 article “Sun Ra’s Space Program: Resituating ‘The Forefather of Afrofuturism’” meets this need historically and contemporarily. The article recontextualizes Sun Ra as a political actor rather than the eccentric oddity, writing against Ra’s anachronistic theoretical framing under “Afrofuturism,” and preferring such historically explicative frameworks as “Afro-Surreal Expressionism.”

‍

Entitled “Sound as Black Situation: Black Nationalist Music, Black Music Criticism, Black Worlding, 1965-1972,” her dissertation brings together the members of the Black nationalist cohort in question, which until now, have only been recorded in disjunct, or at best parallel, narratives that abstract each actor – Amiri Baraka, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Sonya Sanchez – from political or musical context. This work continues a nascent cooperative Black history in music studies – a history engaged with and contributed to by scholars such as George Lewis, Daphne Brooks, Philip Ewell, and Matthew Morrison – that has begun to contend with the fallacy of Black objecthood pervading the field. 

‍

This program is presented in conjunction with the current exhibition UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe, on view through August 16, 2026.