SXSW '25: Sally
This year at SXSW I spoke to a woman while I waited for our film to start, and she told me that in the past documentaries reigned over the film festival. The narratives were there but the real thing that you came for were the documentaries. Films that still crafted a story but through real-life events that you either couldn’t believe happened, or were so important that the only true way to tell the story was from the mouths of the people who lived these experiences. If what she said was true, this year’s focus on having killer documentaries is a welcome one, with Sally being a highlight.
NASA Astronaut Sally Ride posing with her space helmet during her time in training as a mission specialist for NASA's STS-7 spaceflight. | Credit: NASA
Sally is a detailed account of the life of Dr. Sally Ride, an extremely gifted physicist and icon of space exploration, Sally’s relationship with her life partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy, and her fight with the spotlight that comes with being the first woman to travel to space. Built through talking head interviews, recordings from Ride herself, and archival footage, Sally fills in the complicated gaps in Ride’s life. The film is mostly a straightforward documentary, not straying too far from the traditional formula, but this works well because of National Geographic’s access to high-quality footage.
The archival footage is rich and crisp, and offers that sort of NASA-heyday glimmer that most think of when they think of space travel. Rather than taking a traditional talking head approach, director Cristina Costantini weaves this footage in to show Ride and her associates as they prepare for their space travels and conduct different tests in a really interesting way. The archival footage is so exciting that the clips become the primary focus of the storytelling over the interviews. Ride and her associates were pioneers of space travel, and their story is an important one to tell. These women haven’t been written out of history. They are on full display here telling their side of the story.
As Ride, who passed away in 2012, cannot provide her own statements, her part of the story is told through interviews and soundbites from previous interviews and speaking engagements. Ride’s partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy, is our narrator through a lot of the documentary. O’Shaughnessy was with Ride throughout her entire career, but people never knew the two were partners. The film lightly touches on Ride’s marriage to Steven Hawley, another astronaut at NASA, during the time when she went to space, but it would have been nice if it delved more into their interactions at home. Instead it leans more into how Ride would travel to visit O’Shaughnessy often and neglect her marriage. Eventually, when Ride came out as a lesbian and revealed her life partner it wasn’t a surprise to family members. Ride’s coworkers seemed a bit shocked but at this point in her life, it was hard to hide. The film does a really great job of making us feel for their relationship and showing that Ride never wanted that part of her life to get in the way of her career and journey with NASA. Although this thread was always present throughout the film, it would have been nice if the film gave Ride’s relationships a bit more time.
Ride’s story is one that needs to be told. She was so full of life and a genuine character in addition to being a genius and the first woman to travel to space. Her relationship with O’Shaughnessy and her fight to be taken seriously as a professional are relatable stories. By letting the audience into these aspects of her life, it offers a new layer to the woman Ride was and the work that she did to further space travel and feminism. She never wanted to be treated any differently from her male counterparts, some of whom didn't believe that she was fit for the job because of her gender. National Geographic’s archival footage is gorgeous and so well preserved and does such a great job visually aiding in telling the story of who Ride was and the atmosphere of NASA in the 70s and 80s. The film flows with a sort of weightlessness that a lot of films have trouble adapting to. Sally fits well into the canon of National Geographic’s recent slate of documentaries.
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Blake Williams has a B.A. in Film and Television Production from Ball State University. He aspires to one day be a director, but until that day comes you can find him at a showing of whatever's playing that day or at home alphabetizing a shelf of movies and games and muttering about how he should "slow down on spending."