It’s been a good year for new documentaries about vintage public access television. The succinctly titled Public Access offered a broad retrospective of public access TV in NYC’s punk & hippie days, the Robin Byrd profile Bang My Box took a deep dive into the pornier waters of those NYC TV shows, and now the UFO cult profile Welcome Space Brothers has jumped coasts to cover the Californian public-access cinema of the Unarius Academy of Science. Well, calling Welcome Space Brothers “new” is somewhat of a stretch. It has spent several years in distribution limbo since its initial festival premieres (the same limbo where Public Access now lingers), but the warm-hearted UFO cult documentary is currently enjoying a city-by-city road tour and recently screened at The Broad. Like this year’s other public access TV docs, it introduces an alluring archive of outsider-art filmmaking from America’s recent weirdo past: a series of indoctrination videos from a Californian cult who believe space aliens are arriving soon to free mankind from the intergalactic trauma echoing from our past lives. It might be the most useful of the trio for audiences who like to do their own exploring, though, since some of the psychotronic “psychodrama” movies it covers are accessible on The Internet Archive instead of being trapped on a private collector’s moldy VHS tapes. You can easily go learn the “science fact” of Unarius’s science fiction UFO-landing movies anytime you’re bored enough to open your heart to another world.

From the outside, Welcome Space Brothers might appear to be a true crime exposé of a shadowy cult organization with a nefarious leader and brainwashed membership, but it’s immediately apparent that Unarius is largely harmless as a collective. It says a lot that the cult itself has been promoting this documentary’s various screening dates through their mailing lists, which I know first-hand as a subscriber who was auto-enrolled after buying a copy of their most notorious production, 1980’s The Arrival, from their archaic website. To the cult, Welcome Space Brothers is a potential recruitment tool, amplifying the reach of their cosmic message far beyond the puny broadcasting capabilities of San Diego-era public access channels, where they started. To most audiences, it reads as a true crime picture without the crime, exposing a secluded community of mysterious cultists as a kind of eccentric art collective. Instead of blowing the doors off Unarius headquarters to reveal abuses of power hidden inside, it mostly just finds a collection of lonely dorks making psychotronic video art together about their favorite subjects: the trauma of their own past lives and the space aliens who are soon to liberate us from those recursive shackles. They’re mostly playing arts & crafts, developing their own unique house style of gawdy drag revue sci-fi kitsch, as beautifully captured in their 70s & 80s heyday of backyard communal filmmaking. As the title suggests, they have nothing to hide. They’re welcoming you in.

Welcome Space Brothers is most useful as a guided tour of Unarius’s pre-existing cinematic output, which can be bewildering to outsiders. It’s not especially substantial as a standalone piece, but it does a great job chronicling the various inner-circle power struggles that shaped Unarius’s golden years, which is essential insight for fully comprehending the communal therapy aspects of the group’s psychotronic theatre. It’s an insular scene with its own designated faces & heels, as lorded over by the cosmic fairy godmother Ruth “Uriel” Norman, whose space-alien drag queen persona was in itself a communal art project. It’s clear when you spend some time with Unarius’s cinematic output that The Arrival is their most fully realized grand-scale art project, reaching delirious heights of video art sci-fi psychedelia the group never achieved before or since; it’s just not clear why until you better understand the behind-the-scenes dynamics of the various weirdos who made these pictures, since everyone but Uriel was stripped of personal attribution in the credits. Welcome Space Brothers explains the real human drama behind the major Unarius titles, which initially earned their ironic so-bad-it’s-good notoriety from local stoners who caught them out of context on late night public-access broadcasts. You could even feel that shift happening in real time at The Broad, where the crowd’s initial titters & jeers at the cult’s absurdity slowly quieted down as we got to know the eccentric characters as individuals, each worthy of intergalactic love & empathy. They’re the only cult I’ve ever trusted with my home address, and I’m excited to be further indoctrinated by their psychodrama videos now that I better understand them as communal diaries rather than as pure aesthetic objects.

-Brandon Ledet