Maryland Film Festival Blog

The Source Family. Photo courtesy of THE SOURCE FAMILY film website.

Maryland Film Festival is pleased to announce the next MFF/WYPR Spotlight Series Film, THE SOURCE FAMILY, which will screen on Tuesday 2/19 at the MICA Brown Center, 7:30pm, with special guests director Jodi Wille and Source Family member Explosion the Aquarian.  THE SOURCE FAMILY, directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos, was an official documentary selection of the 2012 Maryland Film Festival and we are thrilled to bring it back to Baltimore for this special-event screening.

The MFF/WYPR Spotlight Series showcases the best of independent film and unites filmmakers with audiences.  Each Spotlight Series film features a conversation between WYPR 88.1FM’s Tom Hall and the filmmaker(s), followed by a Q & A with the audience .

MFF/WYPR Spotlight Series presents THE SOURCE FAMILY with special guests director Jodi Wille Source Family member Explosion the Aquarian
Tuesday, 2/19
7:30pm
MICA Brown Center
1301 W. Mt. Royal Ave.
Baltimore, MD
$7/Free for FOFs! 

The Source restaurant on the Sunset Strip, LA. Photo courtesy of THE SOURCE FAMILY film website.

SYNOPSIS:
You’ve heard of the psychedelic-era spiritual family The Source, even if you don’t think you have. Their Sunset Strip restaurant was an L.A. mainstay for decades, a favorite of celebs like John and Yoko, and the setting of a crucial scene in ANNIE HALL. The family’s psych-rock band Ya Ho Wha 13 self-released dozens of LPs, now Holy Grails to record collectors and cutting-edge musicians. But these points of intersection with pop culture are just the public tip of an intensely private iceberg, finally unveiled in this brilliantly assembled documentary.

Central to their story is patriarch Father Yod, aka YaHoWha. A former marine, jujitsu expert, and stuntman born Jim Baker, by the 1950s he’d reinvented himself as a beatnik and pioneering vegetarian restaurateur. In 1969 he opened The Source restaurant, instantly a gathering place for hippies and other cultural outsiders. This community coalesced into a close-knit family that increasingly hung on Yod‘s every word, with results all at once beautiful, insular, and tragic. And for Yod, who’d already morphed from man of violence to spiritual guru, there was one major twist yet to come.

Throughout it all, members of the family rigorously documented their private and public moments alike. Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wille have fused the cream of this rich self-documented history with ample archival context and eye-opening contemporary interviews. The result is, simply put, one of the major documentary events of the year, a riveting account of a group of people who forged their own stranger-than-fiction path.  (-2012 MFF Program Guide)

ABOUT JODI WILLE: Jodi Wille is copublisher of Dilettante Press and Process Media, the latter of which published The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, YaHoWha 13, and The Source Family in 2007.  She conceptualized and copublished Gary Lee Boas’ book Starstruck: Photographs from a Fan, and published Pure Country: The Leon Kagarise Archives 1961-1971 and Dear Andy Kaufman, I Hate Your Guts!, a Gold Medal winner at the 2010 Independent Book Awards. She has also worked as a television producer, photographer and music video director. She specializes in collaborating with individuals who have amassed personal archives that document American subcultures, covering subjects such as John Sinclair and MC5, Roky Erickson and The 13th Floor Elevators, Moondog, and Ya Ho Wha 13.

Official site for THE SOURCE FAMILY: http://thesourcedoc.com/