Pyhthon imports in IntelliJ...... Local imports working yet giving error

IntelliJ
I used to use PyCharm to do coding for school projects
I have decided to switch to IntelliJ so that I can do python, HTML, CSS, javascript, etc without having to switch from program to program each time.
a project uses a local python package structured as follows:

-project_08
                - mods

                            - __init__
                - swap_even_odd.py
                - min_max.py

using the code 

from mods import *

I was able to import the underlying functions without any errors

switching to IntelliJ, the code still runs fine but the import is not recognized by IntelliJ
how do I fix this?