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.
I know that this is something the filmmakers couldn't have anticipated when they were making the film, but it turns a fairly conventional documentary into a political manifesto for its moment in time. When it shows up on streaming at Disney+ you should watch it as a middle finger to the powers that currently run the country. This assumes Disney is comfortable with the recreations of Ride's private life. Recreations are part of the documentary toolbox now, however much verite` purists might squawk, but the ones in Sally are particularly glaring because they are unusually intimate. The film is better when it lets Ride speak for herself from the huge archive of interviews she gave during her lifetime, and then when it gives the stage to Tam O'Shaughnessy and Ride's other friends and family members. Of particular note is Billie Jean King, who Ride met through tennis and whose outing was a cautionary tale for her. King was arguably the greatest women's tennis player of her era, the avatar of women in the so-called "Battle of the Sexes" against chauvinist Bobby Riggs, but when she was outed as a lesbian, she lost basically everything. Ride kept her own private life so secret that there was a minor shock in the culture when her obituary mentioned her life-partner of three decades. Tam wrote that obituary herself, with Sally's blessing. In this regard, this film provides an insight into one of the most famous people in the world, one who people thought they knew. It turns out that the world didn't know her at all.
The film gives Sally Ride's accomplishments their due credit and occasionally reveals her as a ruthless competitor. One of the other women in her class of astronauts noted that Ride created a problem with the robot arm simulator which she supervised to either test the next-up astronaut or to sabotage them in the pecking order. There are occasional shots of her blistering side-eye whenever people around her are being stupid about her gender. I knew the story of NASA's engineers wanting to send her into space with 100 tampons for a seven day flight from Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut science fiction novels, which is patently ridiculous and indicative that even very smart men know nothing about women. Those books took some heat for depicting the over the top sexism directed at women astronauts. Archived interviews from the early 80s included here show that Kowal may have understated the case. The steel in Sally Ride's spine is on full display in the footage from the commission on the Challenger disaster, for whom she put NASA's feet to the fire. It could well have been her on that flight instead of her friend, Judy Resnick, after all, and boy howdy does she know it. There's a barely contained furnace of rage there. Meanwhile, the core of the film is the struggle between visibility and assimilation that all queer people face. Sally Ride kept her life private (probably with good reason) and when Tam O'Shaughnessy suggests that Sally Ride Science, Sally and Tam's company promoting STEM careers to girls and women, might have failed miserably had the world known it was run by a couple of "lesbos" (her word), she knows in her bones that Sally was right. But the need to be in the closet was tearing them apart.
All of this is put in a familiar format. This is not a documentary that plays around with formal cinematic daring. It's all talking heads, archive footage, home movies and photographs, and the odd recreation of things for which there is no documentary record. It's conventional. Comforting, even. Its conventionality may even be of a piece with Sally Ride's own preferences in the way she managed her public life. This is a woman, after all, who married another (male) astronaut as a beard for a while and never spoke publicly about any of the parts of her private life depicted in this film. I can't tell if that's laudable or tragic, but I suspect Ride would have thought that it was the price of doing business. In any event, the film gets points for refraining from using "Mustang Sally" at any point of its running time. So it's that adventurous at least.
River of Grass (2025, directed by Sasha Wortzel) is a portrait of the blind destructiveness of human beings in the face of nature. It's a portrait of the Florida Everglades and an indictment of the human activity that is destroying them. It frames its narrative as a dreamy history centering around the work of late environmentalist Marjorie Stoneman Douglass, who wrote a book about the Everglades from which this film takes its title, and also around the modern day activists trying to mitigate human activity in the Everglades. Many of them are from the First Nations, though not exclusively. There are also African American activists trying to prevent the burning of sugar cane fields every year, an activity that sends toxic smoke downwind into poor communities. And a mother and daughter who hunt the Everglades at night looking for Burmese pythons, human pets that have become an invasive species destroying the native wildlife. But the emphasis here is on the Everglades as a system, as an organism, and how human activity has completely disrupted the system that creates the Everglades in the first place. The Everglades, the film tells us, are the only ecosystem of its kind in the world and without them, the human habitation of Florida in the first place is probably not even possible in the first place. Certainly not on the scale of cities like Miami and Tampa.
This is a climate story, of course. It begins with a hurricane and the names of past hurricanes. Unlike other climate films, it doesn't demonize the hurricane. It arrives at the necessity of hurricanes as a cleansing force for the Everglades, particularly in the maintenance of Lake Okeechobee, the source of ALL of Florida's fresh water and now sequestered from feeding the Everglades. The effects of its sequestration are dire, resulting in algae blooms, red tides, diminished fishing off-shore, and a denial of the renewing fresh water of the Everglades themselves. Other barriers to the ecosystem's life's blood are the highways that cross the Everglades between Fort Myers and Naples and Miami. Miami is the biggest villain here. As the film progresses, an argument emerges that Miami is a city that shouldn't exist in the first place. The hubris of this city's very existence is breathtaking.
The heart of the film is the interview footage of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas herself. She died in 1998 at 108 years old, so she saw the full breadth of the human occupation of south Florida with her own eyes. She was absolutely clear-eyed about who had despoiled the everglades and she pulled no punches by naming names. This was a woman who did not soften her tone or tolerate bullshit. Her inheritors are similarly brusque. Betty Osceola leads prayer walks through the Everglades as part spiritual journey, part environmental clarion call. They put a pin in the many ways human beings continue to destroy the ecosystem. Like Sally, this is a fairly conventional documentary composed of dreamy nature shots, recreations, archive footage, and interviews, but Wortzel leaves these scenes in the environment, which transforms them. The director conceived of the film after a dream during a hurricane, and it retains a certain dream logic.
In How Deep is Your Love (2025), director Eleanor Mortimer boards a research ship bound for the deep ocean a few thousand kilometers southwest of Costa Rica. The expedition has been sponsored by the Natural History Museum in London in collaboration with deep sea mining interests to assess the ecological impact of such an enterprise. The principle scientists are taxonomists, working in a field devoted to describing organisms and placing them into the family tree of all life. The film documents life on ship as it sails for the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone, 12 days away from land where they drop a robot submersible to view the seafloor and the animals that live there and to collect samples. It also documents the politics behind the mission. Running concurrently with the main story is a meeting of the International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica, whose mission is to decide when or if to open the seabed to mining. They principally work to put off the decision rather than commit to it. This is obviously a film where science is in conflict with politics and commerce, and the tension between moral exploration and immoral exploitation is in the negative space of every bit of the film, no matter how enthusiastic the scientists are at every new image they see and every new sample they collect.
The main draw of the film is the footage of benthic fauna, much of it alien to human knowledge. The film opens with the fact that seventy percent of the Earth's surface is covered with water and that humans have only explored a tiny fraction of that area. Indeed, it speculates at the hubris of calling a world "Earth" when so much of it is water. The creatures of the deep are truly alien, and the film lingers on them with rapt fascination. Every so often, though, the film reminds us of the human intrusion, whether it's the attempt to trap a bright purple sea cucumber or the trench dug by a previous mining expedition. This last seems like an obscenity in comparison to the field of nodules spreading around it. Those nodules form so slowly that the trench will likely remain for the rest of human history. Some animals have moved into it, though.
The depiction of scientists is delightful, though. Almost all of the taxonomists involved are women, but all of the scientists have a sense of glee and whimsy in their work. They assign names like "Barbie Pig" and "Psychedelic Elvis" to the animals they discover. This joy of discovery is coupled with a vague sense of dread that they might be responsible for the destruction of whole ecosystems. The nodules that are the target of miners are each micro-ecosystems unto themselves, which will be lost with every one of them that is seized for human use. The film is infected a bit by the glee and whimsy. When it turns its sights back to London and the fundraising dinner at the Natural History Museum, it chooses to superimpose the most spectacular animals on the screen next to humans.
Director Eleanor Mortimer provides the narration herself and the film occasionally has a stream of consciousness narrative structure. Mortimer's narration is mixed a bit low and is delivered in that deadpan half-whisper that's all the rage in documentary filmmaking these days (see for instance Miranda July's narration for Fires of Love). This can be irritating and I found myself wishing for subtitles more than once. It's a minor complaint. For the most part, this is a gorgeous and eye-opening cinematic experience, one salted with enough activism and alarm to temper the images.
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