Music Mondays Presents: Space is the Place

Music Mondays at the Drafthouse is traveling to weird intergalactic territories with this week’s offering Space is the Place, starring jazz great Sun Ra. The 1974 film follows a bizarre plot in which Sun Ra attempts to colonize a planet he and his Arkestra discover in outer space with African-Americans living in Oakland, California. Along the way, he encounters resistance from the FBI and a mysterious character called The Overseer.

It’s exactly the sort of film you might expect to come from the mind of Sun Ra, a man who not only redefined jazz music during his decades as an artist but who also once claimed to have visited Saturn. The film was initially released on VHS at just a little over an hour, but The Drafthouse will be showing the director’s cut, which is a full twenty minutes longer.