Entry #6: Hidden Figures

In this entry, I will talk about the film “Hidden Figures” directed by Theodore Melfi in 2016, starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe as the roles of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson respectively.

Katherine Johnson was a mathematician who calculated the flight trajectories, launch windows and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights. Dorothy Vaughan was the first African-American woman to supervise a group of staff at the Langley Research Center. Mary Jackson was NASA's first African-American female engineer.

The movie shows how the main protagonists struggled because of the discrimination at that time, so they couldn’t receive the treatment they deserved, as all of this happened during the NASA's Mercury Project in order to accomplish the mission of reaching the moon before the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The discrimination shown in the movie was clearly crude and rude, for example, there were two bathrooms for women, one for white people and others for color people. Another example was that there were specially designated places for color people in the public transport and that they could not access easily to public services like getting a trial, read books from the library or going to universities.

I had never seen the film before until I watched it during the class of Software Design and Architecture one week ago, and I have to admit that I liked it a lot. I personally like this type of movies, the ones that are based on a real story or event because it is interesting how the stories are told and how the characters fight to reach their goals.

This movie has an important message: It does not matter what people say about you; if you know that you are good at something or it is something that you love, then do it, no one and nothing can stop you from doing it.

For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures