‘People didn’t like women in space’: how Sally Ride made history and paid the price

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Ride was the first US woman in space – but a National Geographic documentary looks at how she was forced to hide her queerness to succeed A week before Sally – a documentary about the first American woman to fly into space – landed at the Sundance film festival in January, Nasa employees received emails informing them how Donald Trump’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) rollbacks would take effect. Contracts and offices associated with DEI programs were to be terminated. Staff were given Orwellian instruction to inform the government of any attempt to disguise inclusion efforts in “coded or imprecise language”. In the weeks to follow, Nasa would take back its promise to send the first woman and person of color to the moon’s surface. Meanwhile, employees are reported to be hiding their rainbow flags and any other expressions of solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community, allegedly because they were instructed to do so though Nasa denies those claims. Continue reading... from Film |...
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The Job of Songs review – folk melodies and melancholia in rural Ireland

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Lila Schmitz’s documentary offers a candid look at Irish music and community struggles in a small Irish village known for its bar-room sessions

That The Banshees of Inisherin may apparently be a documentary is the main takeaway of this swift but wide- and deep-ranging investigation into the musical community of Doolin, County Clare. It’s a truism to point out the absorption with the landscape in Irish folk music, and a certain attendant melancholia. But it’s hard not to go back to such ideas when one interviewee says of nearby tourist attraction the Cliffs of Moher: “Who wants to look over a big cliff? Unless you’re thinking of jumping?”

Once a remote scrum of thatched cottages, Doolin is now on the tourist trail thanks to its uninterrupted tradition of bar-room sessions – in which all-comers are welcome to pitch in with whatever musical talent they have. The place seems to lie on a nexus of ley lines in time and space through which song and community irrepressibly well up. Christy Barry, who runs a music centre, reveals how his mother, unpaid, taught the entire village flute and fiddle. Stretching back further than the Irish famine and the subsequent waves of emigration, this melodic heritage draws on what one musician here believes amounts to a millennium of orally transmitted music.

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