‘Sally’ explains why a trailblazing astronaut stayed in the closet

The name Sally Ride has bone whispers. As the first American woman to go to space in 1983, Ride became an icon. The young girls who saw a famous astronaut on the cover of Newsweek, the people and even the lady.

This was the case for director Christina Kostantini. Her documentary film “Sally“It was first shown in Sundance, is a poem for her childhood hero. It will be broadcast on Monday at 9 pm on National Geographic before flowing on Hulu and Disney+.

“I have been a fan of Sally since I was a young child,” says the director at a remote conference call alongside Ride partner, Tam O’shaughenessy. “I drew a mural that is still on the wall of my elementary school. I have reported a book about it. The equation was simple: seeing a woman doing big brave things that women were not supposed to do. I think it might be able to do big things as well.”

But “Sally” is not just a picture of how an ENCINO is a young man who escaped with ground aspirations to NASA and became, Costantini jokingly said, “The first girl in space.” Instead, the documentary threads governed by a well -known story with a special story about how Ride has a relationship of approximately three decades with Occnssy secretly until her cancer death in 2012, when Eamenting riding Make it public.

Now, “Sally” puts their love story in the forefront and the center. Drama, love messages, photographs, and home videos paint a happy couple with a life that has been pleased with themselves away from the audience’s eye. The sexual activity in Ride is not dealt with only as a footnote to her story, and the documentary is asking viewers to understand why the astronaut chose to encircle a part of her life and live in a treasury of her making.

“I was worried that the movie might be very difficult for Sally,” Uchonesi admits.

“Why couldn’t you go out and” completely poor “and all, do you know?” You ask my rhetoric. “But this is not what it seems. The fact of the matter is when I met and Sally in the mid -1980s, it was somewhat dangerous to be open. You might miss a lot of opportunities with your career, with the projects you want to participate in.”

And like that, he feels dice again today, she says. “But I think it is really good for young viewers to see in the movie that there are good reasons for Sally and I am not open to the audience.”

Tam O’shaughnessy, Sally Ride partner for nearly 30 years.

(Michael Latham/National Geographic)

For the context, “Sally” offers other contemporary narrations coming: those of Billie Jean King, which was met by Ride and Ourshaoughness during tennis play years, and Ride Karen “Bear”, Sally. The former lost her approvals after she crossed her secretary just as her tennis career was flourishing; The other was Trailblazing The Minister of Seventeen Seventeen Those who called for the LGBTQ community. King and Ride’s sister’s experiences, as the Doc suggested, affected how and why the astronaut chose to marry a man while working in NASA – Stephen Holie, who appears in the movie – and later decided to live a quiet private life with O’Shaughnessy.

Throughout her career, Ride faced sexual discrimination and hated women from her peers and journalism alike (“In your training, when there was a problem, how did you respond? Have you cry?” She was asked at a press conference). As a result, viewers may begin to understand the reason for choosing a famous space pioneer to avoid further scrutiny, and is likely to be homosexual, because of her role facing the audience as a NASA girl.

While the documentary does not ride its options and does not exempt it from the thorny accounts that it made to build the life that wanted itself, “Sally” is an influential reminder that it is not always easy to analyze questions about vision and acting.

So in its absence, O’Shaughnessy tries to set the record straight. Costantini’s concentration on their relationship in “Sally” aims to show how an integral part of the Ride legacy.

“I think this kind of courage that Sally was a kind of courage she understood as a child you understand,” explains Costantini. “Going to a bomb mainly in space – this is very frightening and frightening in a physical way. Thus, as a child, you have charm and appreciation for that.

“But a complete kind of courage – the ability to determine who you are, even if you hate it, that you have the ethical courage to be who was born to be, to say the truth – I think, as an adult, is much more difficult.”

As a picture of Trailblazer, Costantini shows us that the heroes are not abandoned. Knowing their humanity and the ways they struggled with their way in this world can be open to their inheritance.

“The film project is your position in history books alongside your amazing partner in life,” says Kostantini Uchonesi, who fights tears. “There is something about seeing you celebrating the beautiful love story that you had together, in public places, which always makes me.”

“Although Sally was not oral, and she certainly did not go out, she still lives in her life in the way she wanted to live,” says Usonesi. “I did the things she wanted to do. I loved the people who wanted to love them. She was honest with herself.”