In 1961, NASA agency announced that it wants some professional people to be astronauts, travel to the space. Many people applied their papers, both men and women. But lately NASA said that only men who can be selected to travel above, the thing which destroyed many women's dreams.
An essential documentary look at yet another example of historical feminism that should never have been forgotten: the first American in space might have and probably should have been a woman.
Though modest in its artistic aims, it's a polished piece of work which has evidently benefited from the luxury of time in both the research stage and the editing suite.
An engaging blend of modern-day interviews and archival footage, Mercury 13 complicates the traditional narrative of triumph surrounding the Mercury missions of the '60s and their culmination with the moon landing.
This is the sort of film that begins modestly-seemingly only a piece of curious history-and grows steadily deeper as it moves to its climax, and that climax is a powerful one.
