Jodi Wille – In Person 2024

Tuesday, April 9, 7:15 PM

Jodi Wille is a filmmaker, curator, and book publisher known for her in-depth work exploring American subcultures and visionary artists. She directed and produced the acclaimed documentary The Source Family (2013), which world-premiered in competition at SXSW Film Festival and had a 60-city theatrical run. Welcome Space Brothers is her second feature documentary.

Wille is co-founder of award-winning book publishing companies Process Media, Dilettante Press, and Otherworld, and recently released the coffee table book Family: The Source Family Scrapbook (Sacred Bones/Otherworld, 2022). She has curated national museum and gallery exhibitions in the US and internationally featuring the art and films of self-taught, or “outsider,” artists and alternative spiritual communities. She has been presenting the films and artwork of The Unarius Academy of Science at museums, cinematheques, and international film festivals since 2014 and has been actively documenting them since 2015.

Welcome Space Brothers
Director: Jodi Wille, Documentary, USA, 94 min

Have you lived on other worlds before? The Unarius Academy of Science in El Cajon, California thinks you have, and that re-enacting those lives–under the loving gaze of spirit guides and a public-access television audience–will heal you. Welcome Space Brothers captures the heyday of the academy, born of the 1970s-era UFO religious movement, and fearlessly led by its outlandish tiara-bearing founder, the late Ruth E. Norman. The film explores the outer limits of belief, community, meaning-making, and our galaxy.