Path to the Stars (Caminho para as Estrelas)

2022, video, 34’41’’

The film “Path to the Stars” follows the journey of a heroine confronted by her own shadow, different temporalities and micro-narratives. It proposes a counter narrative composed of complex biographies that overlap and interact: from the anticolonial freedom fighters of the past, and the uncertainty of the present, the desire to belong, to the projection of a future where our symbiosis with nature is recuperated.

The film follows the journey, from dawn to dusk, of an ex-combatant of the Angolan struggle for liberation as she travels by boat past the banks of the Kwanza River, the birthplace of the Ndongo kingdom, a pre-colonial African tributary state of the Kongo kingdom, created by sub-groups of the Ambundu, and led by King Ngola. A metaphor of a female place that threads through various times and spaces, a serene-faced woman intently observes the nature that surrounds her, while her body slowly merges with the watery currents of the river. Various characters appear throughout this journey: a shadow, an old woman and a child, soldiers who try to read their future in the lines of a map of Angola, and an astronaut, all of whom spin their stories in the murmur of the river.