Argentinian-American Cristina Costantini is the director behind several of your favorite documentaries – Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado, Netflix’s recently released Karol G: Tomorrow Was Beautiful, and Science Fair. This week, Sally hits National Geographic. It tells the story of Sally Ride, a personal hero of the director’s, and the first U.S. woman to go into outer space.

Of her 2025 releases, Costantini tells Latina Media Co, “I think both films are in some ways, about people who felt they had to suppress part of who they were to get where they want to be, which, to me, is a very universal experience. We’ve all gone through that.” And of course, in the case of Sally Ride (and Karol G too), it’s “Women navigating these mostly male spaces.”

With the bro-in-chief making our country less hospitable to women, LGBTQ folks, and people of color, Costantini’s work is all the more timely. For Sally isn’t just about Ride becoming the first U.S. lady astronaut in 1983 – it’s also a celebration of her love story with Tam O’Shaughnessy, a relationship Ride kept private her entire life – that only became public after she passed away in 2012.

For her part, Costantini believes Sally serves as an inspiration for us today – and a warning. “When we look back, we can see the struggles of people who came before us. And so, having lived in 1983 for the past few years in the edit, I’ve seen how far we’ve come,” the director shares. “And I’ve also seen what it looks like to have to hide part of yourself to get where you want to go. And I think in the next four years, there’s a lot of these communities – the Latino community, the queer community – that’s going to be thinking about this question: ‘What negotiations do I have to do on a daily basis to get where I want to go, to follow my dreams, to even exist?”

For Ride, the answer was to hide her personal life from her very public persona. Sally investigates what that cost without sensationalizing it thanks to many heartfelt moments of O’Shaughnessy remembering her late partner. In fact, Constantini confesses, “I really have fallen in love with Tam… She was incredibly vulnerable and talked about the difficulty of loving a person who’s doing something like what Sally was doing and loving a person like Sally.” As a result, the documentary allows viewers to “live in the beauty of a love story, of a great love story that couldn’t have played out in the public” at the time.

For space nuts, there’s plenty of behind-the-scenes NASA action too, thanks to Costantini’s deep dive into the archive. Watching Sally, feels like we’re in the room with Ride as she takes the helm (capcom to be precise) on a dangerous mission and we’re “in the space shuttle with Sally as she’s about to take off. It’s a documentary, but I wanted to play with the tension of a scripted film,” says Costantini. “I wanted the audience to connect with the anxiety of going into space, of the anxiety of trying to keep your friends safe, being the main person who’s responsible for whether they live or die. The heat tiles have come off of the shuttle, and I wanted those movements to be tense like they were in real life.” Costantini succeeds in that and so much more with this documentary that first met audiences at Sundance before heading to SXSW and, eventually, its home at National Geographic.

The film also does a particularly good job of complicating our understanding of heroism through Ride. “There’s a version of this story that could have been ‘If you work really hard and follow your dreams, you can do great things too.’ And I think that story’s there. I think that we need heroes, and we need people to look up to like I did as a child. We need people that we can say, ‘If Sally did it, I can do it’” explains Constantini, adding, “Our heroes are complicated, more complicated than we think, oftentimes. And Sally’s a great example of that. And I love that she was sabotaging her friends maybe or that she was not always the best partner… She’s my hero, but she’s a complicated woman.”

That vision – of an extraordinary woman with ordinary faults and extraordinary challenges – is one we need today. We need our imperfect, real selves to meet this moment of injustice with all the bravery we can muster. Like Tam O’Shaughnessy did and Sally Ride did. And we need to keep loving each other even when our courage stalls. That’s the message of Cristina Costantini’s Sally and so it’s worth an affirming, warning-filled watch.

Sally will air on National Geographic June 16 and stream on Disney+/Hulu the following day.