Year: 2023
Director: Jodi Wille
Starring: Kevin Kennedy, Tracey Kennedy, Dave Osborne
Format: DCP
Running Time: 1hr 30min

Ojai Playhouse presents a rare interstellar double feature: an advance theatrical screening of this year’s festival cult favorite Welcome Space Brothers, along with a pristine digital transfer of the 1980 Unarius-produced 16mm outsider masterpiece The Arrival!

Q&A between films with Jodi Wille and Unariuns in-person!

Welcome Space Brothers

Hop aboard as this engrossing film takes you to the world of the Unarians: cosmic visionaries who believe in higher planes, therapy and movie-making.

Founded in 1954 by Californian couple Ernest and Ruth Norman, the Unarius Academy of Science uses ‘fourth-dimensional physics’ to contact extraterrestrials dwelling on higher dimensional planes. After Ernest died in 1971, the beings told Ruth – aka “Archangel Uriel” – that her followers could heal their psyches by making films based on the past lives they’d uncovered in group therapy. Sparing no expense, Uriel set up an art studio, set-design workshop, video and audio labs, and music recording studio, and the Unarians’ metaphysical society quickly became a grassroots filmmaking collective whose psychodramas aired on public-access TV during the late 1970s and 80s.

Director Jodi Wille has spent 25 years exploring alternative spiritual communities; her 2012 film The Source Family focused on a 1970s Los Angeles commune. In this affectionate celebration of extra-outsider art, executive-produced by Elijah Wood, Wille captures the exuberance that self-taught creativity can bring to ordinary people in search of meaning. The cosmic space fleet may not have landed in 2001 as Uriel predicted, but when this flamboyantly dressed woman became an independent filmmaker in her 70s, she proved that the truth of movie magic is out there. (Kate Jinx, Melbourne International Film Festival)