Fly With Me

February 2024 | GBH American Experience

FILM SYNOPSIS

How the first female flight attendants in the 1960s were at the leading edge of women’s rights, changing gender norms and equal opportunity in the workplace law. Fly with Me is a story about new frontiers for working women and the constraints of traditional notions of femininity. It’s about both exploitation and activism, and pitched battles within the courtrooms of the United States. Maligned as feminist sellouts and sluts, stewardesses, as they were called, knew different: They were on the frontlines of a battle to assert gender equality and transform the workplace. Fly with Me will rely on firsthand witness accounts, personal stories, and a rich and extensive archive to tell a lively, fun, and important but neglected history of the women who, while flying the world, changed it.

FILM TEAM

Director, Sarah Colt has primarily directed and produced for PBS’ award-winning history series, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE – including the Emmy-nominated Walt Disney, The Gilded Age, Henry Ford, The Polio Crusade, and, most recently, Billy Graham, which premiered in 2021. The Disrupted, Sarah Colt’s first independent feature documentary, premiered in 2020, is an emotionally rich observational drama about a displaced factory worker in Ohio, a 5th generation Kansas farmer in danger of losing the family land, and a laid-off mortgage processor turned Uber driver in Florida, and their urgent efforts to overcome financial circumstances beyond their control. A graduate of Harvard University, Sarah began her career as a still photographer. As a Radcliffe Traveling Fellow, she spent a year living and photographing in Zimbabwe. She later joined David Grubin Productions, where she began producing documentary films, including RFK and the Emmy Award-winning series, The Secret Life of the Brain—both for PBS. After being awarded an International Reporting Project Fellowship in 2004, she wrote, produced, and directed Namibia: This Land is Ours, which premiered as part of Frontline World’s Rough Cut series, and examined the racial imbalance of land ownership in Southern Africa. Sarah has earned several awards for her work including an Emmy and a Peabody nomination.