The annual True/False film festival has arrived in my fair city once again this past weekend, and I have once again been knee-deep in non-fiction films. As is usual for the festival, some films tended to rhyme with other films. Several films were about women in science. They weren't only about that, but the theme was consistent enough.
Sally (2025, directed by Cristina Constantini), the last film I saw on the second day of True/False was a bog-standard biography of Astronaut Sally Ride, notable, perhaps, because it emphasized her life from the point of view of her partner of 27 years, Tam O'Shaughnessy. It was a late show and I worried that I might nod off after a long day of movies either in the theater or on the road driving home. I needn't have worried. Ride is a personal hero of mine and I was keenly interested in the life she didn't share with the public during her lifetime. I wasn't expecting to walk away from the film with an incandescent white-hot spike of rage in the center of my brain, but that's what happened anyway. The last text card in the film details NASA's first Pride event two years after Ride's death honoring her memory and her partner. This film is debuting in a month when the current US executive branch is stoking a new lavender scare and canceling anything that is "woke" or "DEI", including such observances at NASA. I have not checked to see if they have scrubbed Sally Ride from the agency's history, but it would not surprise me if they did. Ride had more personal courage and integrity than the entirety of today's current ruling party of moral cowards, tin-pot dictator wannabes, and thieves and grifters and perverts. Sally Ride was a titan in comparison.
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