2025 / Dir. Christine Turner / 2025 Chicago International Film Festival
☆ 3/5
Watch if you like: Sun Ra, jazz, and those History Channel documentaries your social studies teacher made you watch back in high school where half the class fell asleep.
The latest in a series of Sun Ra documentaries acts as a fundamental overview of Sun Ra’s career as a pioneering Afro-futurist jazz musician and band leader. Shifting between talking heads—including the remaining members of the Sun Ra Arkestra—and archival photos and videos, Sun Ra: Do the Impossible is quite thorough, albeit over quickly in less than 90 minutes. Watching this, you certainly get the sense of how radical he was for the time and his lasting impact on Black culture, although it’s odd how dry a documentary this is for a guy who claimed to be from Saturn. Only something more unconventional could have truly suited the creator of avant-garde jazz albums like Lanquidity and Sleeping Beauty, but this is a good place to start for newcomers and the curious if they don’t mind the old-school documentary style.
