Seen at...
Sally!
- Director: Deborah Craig, Jörg Fockele, Ondine Rarey
- Producer: Deborah Craig, Jörg Fockele, Jenni Olson, Ondine Rarey, Corey Tong
CGiii Comment
The question is: Why have only a few people heard of Sally Gearhart?
Considering she was a diehard, radical, separatist, lesbian feminist - in other words, a man-hater - the answer, as this film supplies, comes as no surprise. The patriarchy, no less. A case of...erase those who oppose you!
The biggest surprise is that it was at the hands of two prominent gay men who helped erase her from modern history, Dustin Lance Black and Gus Van Sant, Oscar-winning writer and Oscar-nominated director of Milk - in typical Hollywood fashion, they just deleted her from Harvey Milk's story. Why? That's the question the film doesn't ask...from either writer or director.
Not just the Patriarchy...
Feminism, through the decades and in all of its varying waves, is a minefield of complexity and conundrum...one such c&c proved to be Gearhart's Achilles' Heel...the matter of [separatist] feminist mothers and their young sons, let that sink in for a moment...the reverberation is seismic! So, it's fair to say that modern Feminism has had a hand [or two] in censuring the-not-so-good-for-business radicals.
Sally Gearhart's story deserves to be told, she deserves to be remembered, for all the right and wrong reasons. SALLY! does a decent job, it isn't just a sycophantic appraisal of a life led differently, this has the warts and all!
Trailer...
The(ir) Blurb...
The feature documentary begins with Sally Gearhart at the height of her powers in the 1970s. She was one of second-wave feminism's most beloved icons, penned a cult classic fantasy novel about a female utopia and fought one of history's greatest battles for queer rights shoulder-to-shoulder with Harvey Milk. But fast forward to 2008 and Sally has been largely forgotten by history-not to mention erased from the Hollywood film "Milk." Yet rather than simply resurrecting her legacy and glorifying one woman's story, "Sally!" now takes a more collectivist turn.
The film traces Sally's life trajectory through the eyes of the exceptional women who fought for justice by her side, revealing that Sally not only instigated the political movements that made her famous but was also deeply shaped by them. Finally, when we revisit Sally in 2014, she is living alone on Women's Land, without the community she helped create. What happened and what will become of her legacy?
Cast & Characters
Sally M. Gearhart (as Self)