In 2014, while shooting a film about lesbians and aging, director Deborah Craig stumbles across octogenarian Sally Gearhart living alone in a ramshackle cabin in the Northern California woods. She is immediately charmed by this outrageous and hilarious character, but soon discovers to her surprise that Gearhart is a once-beloved lesbian-feminist icon who fought center-stage with Harvey Milk during one of the most terrifying, thrilling and revolutionary periods in the struggle for gay rights. Craig embarks upon a quest to ensure that she isn’t forgotten by history, but with Sally nothing is quite as it seems. Instead of a traditional bio-pic of a hidden figure, SALLY becomes something between a wild lesbian safari and a timely and deeply-moving meditation on the tensions inherent in revolutionary movements: Ideological principles versus human realities, separatism versus mainstreaming, and throwing down the gauntlet versus reaching across the aisle.
This project is made possible with generous support from the Berkeley Film Foundation and California Humanities.
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