De Miranda’s film draws upon these historical layers. He dedicates the book to those with whom he shared space in the prison of Tarrafal in Cape Verde for anti-colonial activities, in tribute (or as he says “a retribute”) to Langston Hughes, and with an inscription of the words of Njinga Mbandi (Queen Njinga) of Ndongo and Matamba, as related by the Portuguese conqueror and historian António Oliveira Cadornega. These are textual acts that, like pouring libation, recall ancestors and nod to interlocutors. Vieira opens the book with a dedication, a tribute, and an epigraph. They drop roots in shifting sands, under moving water, and reach toward the light. Inspired in part by Vieira’s O Livro dos Rios (2006), de Miranda’s film is an act of historically grounded poetic license, a riff, perhaps, on what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation.” Like the river plants with tenuous roots that bob around Carlota, floating Ophelia like in the river, these are growths of imagination that elaborate the experiences of those marginalized in official historical accounts. Mónica de Miranda and Yara Monteira wrote the film’s script, drawing lines and spirit from Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira and Portuguese poet Cláudia R. Like the bubbles children blow from bottles, de Miranda breathes life into the photo to create a possible story, a story that floats along a river, on a path to the stars-to somewheres, otherwises, and futures. Sources are fragmentary, incomplete they leave a trace, but offer little concrete to deepen our understanding. We don’t know her last name or really anything about her. Shortly after he met and took the photo of her, Carlota died in an ambush. The single photo that exists of her comes from Kapuściński’s book. We know her from Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński’s account of Angolan independence in Another Day of Life. Combining, in equal parts, film’s cinematic and theatrical aspects, Path to the Stars plots a story of Angola’s liberation struggle on the river and in the words spoken by Carlota, a guerrilla fighter, a woman, never named but embodied by actor Renata Torres.Ĭarlota lived and died at Angola’s independence. The film itself is river-like, drawing from many sources but cutting a path all its own. “It’s a solid piece of work.Path to the Stars follows a river. “It would be a very significant event.”Īlthough an encounter with Gliese 710 was already thought possible, “it’s nice to see it confirmed with a better model and better data”, says Weissman. The star could also change Neptune’s orbit a fraction, says Paul Weissman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Such a path could jostle objects in the Oort cloud, the Kuiper belt – a swarm of icy objects beyond Neptune’s orbit – as well as others that orbit in a disc between the two regions. Gliese 710 also has a 1 in 10,000 probability of coming within 1000 astronomical units – 1 AU being the distance from the Earth to the sun. Fortunately, previous work on the effect of a star tangling with the Oort cloud hints the comets would arrive in a trickle, with only one entering an Earth-crossing orbit per year. This could scatter millions of comets into paths that cross Earth’s orbit. Previous studies have suggested that Gliese 710 could pass through the Oort cloud in about 1.5 million years.īobylev’s calculations suggest Gliese 710 has an 86 per cent chance of passing through the Oort cloud. However, the biggest threat comes from another star, Gliese 710, an orange dwarf now some 63 light years away but zooming our way at 14 kilometres per second.
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