Spacewoman
Hannah Berryman / United Kingdom / 2024 / European Premiere / 95 min
Cosmic portrait of the first female astronaut to pilot a space shuttle mission. Eileen Collins broke the glass ceiling all the way into space, and is a riveting storyteller of her own incredible story.
Astronaut Eileen Collins made history twice. The first time when she arrived at NASA as a pilot at a time when there were almost no women in this elite field, and the second time when she became the first woman to pilot and command a space shuttle mission.
Collins was born in the 1960s into a working class family without privilege. Since childhood she dreamed of the skies, and with her positive and deeply sympathetic personality, she worked her way up from mediocre student to national hero. Only nine months after seeing her first sunrise over the Earth, she gives birth to her first child. Through video calls from the International Space Station, she sings Soviet cosmonaut anthems like lullabies and defines a new kind of motherhood: the galactic kind.
In ‘Spacewoman’, Collins tells her own story, and she is a riveting narrator with a unique insight into the overlooked psychological dimension of astronaut life and the unimaginable pressures that come with it – and the need to keep a cool head even in the most incredible situations. A small step for a woman, a giant leap for womankind.