Birmingham Hosts Free Outdoor Screening of Sun Ra Documentary at Sloss Furnaces

Film Birmingham and Sloss Furnaces will present the official Alabama debut of The Magic City: Birmingham According to Sun Ra on Thursday, April 2, 2026, screening the locally produced documentary outdoors underneath the north-side water tower on the Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark campus. Admission is free and open to the public, with doors at 7:00 PM and the film beginning at 8:00 PM. Directors Guillaume Maupin and Pablo Guarise will participate in a Q&A session following the screening.

The documentary traces how Birmingham's industrial and segregated environment shaped the cosmic philosophy and music of jazz visionary Sun Ra, drawing on rare footage, archival interviews, and neighborhood memories to build its portrait of the city's most otherworldly native son. Maupin and Guarise shot the film entirely on film stock to achieve what they call a "throwback aesthetic," a deliberate production choice that mirrors the archival sensibility of the material itself.

Alabama audiences have already had one glimpse of the project. An unofficial test screening of an unfinished cut debuted at the Sidewalk Film Festival the prior year, making April 2 the first time Birmingham will see the completed film in a formal, sanctioned context. The event is framed as part of the ongoing Year of Birmingham Jazz initiative, which celebrates the city's contributions to the genre.

The Q&A is expected to cover Sun Ra's relationship with Birmingham before he became a world-renowned artist, the making of the film, the Magic City's role in its success, and how aspiring filmmakers can pursue community-focused storytelling. That last thread gives the evening a particular resonance for anyone working in the Alabama independent film space: the directors are explicitly coming back to talk craft and access, not just to screen their finished work.

Sloss Furnaces, a National Historic Landmark whose blast furnaces operated for nearly a century on the industrial labor of Birmingham's Black workers, provides a charged backdrop for a documentary about how that same industrial and segregated city forged one of jazz's most radical imaginations.

For event information, contact events@slossfurnaces.org.