Humans

Alice Winocour’s new film Proxima shows the difficulties of balancing family life with a career as an astronaut, finds Simon Ings

Humans 29 July 2020
By Simon Ings
Astronaut Sarah Loreau (Eva Green) prepares to leave Earth in Proxima
Dharamsala & Darius films

Proxima
Alice Winocour

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In UK cinemas from 31 July
THE year before Apollo 11’s successful mission to the moon, Robert Altman directed James Caan and Robert Duvall in Countdown. The 1968 film stuck to the technology of its day, pumping up the drama with a somewhat outlandish mission plan: astronaut Lee Stegler and his shelter pod are sent to the moon’s surface on separate flights and Stegler must find the shelter once he lands if he is to survive.
The film played host to characters you might conceivably bump into at the supermarket: the astronauts, engineers and bureaucrats have families and everyday troubles not so very different from your own.
Proxima is Countdown for the 21st century. Sarah Loreau, an astronaut played brilliantly by Eva Green, is given a last-minute opportunity to join a Mars precursor mission to the International Space Station. Loreau’s training and preparation are impressively captured on location at European Space Agency facilities in Cologne, Germany – with a cameo from French astronaut Thomas Pesquet – and in Star City, the complex outside Moscow that is home to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. She is ultimately headed to launch from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.
Comparing Proxima with Countdown shows how much both cinema and the space community have changed in the past half-century. There are archaeological traces of action-hero melodramatics in Proxima, but they are the least satisfying parts of the movie. Eva Green is a credible astronaut and a good mother, pushed to extremes on both fronts and painfully aware that she chose this course for herself. She can’t be all things to all people all of the time and, as she learns, there is no such thing as perfect.

Because Proxima is arriving late – its launch was delayed by the covid-19 lockdown – advances in space technology have already somewhat gazzumped Georges Lechaptois’s metliculous location cinematography. I came to the film still reeling from watching the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour lift off from Kennedy Space Center on 20 May.
That crewed launch was the first of its kind from US soil since NASA’s space shuttle was retired in 2011 and looked, from the comfort of my sofa, about as eventful as a ride in an airport shuttle bus. So it was hard to take seriously those moments in Proxima when taking off from our planet’s surface is made the occasion for an existential crisis. “You’re leaving Earth!” exclaims family psychologist Wendy (Sandra Hüller) at one point, thoroughly earning the look of contempt that Loreau shoots at her.
Proxima‘s end credits include endearing shots of real-life female astronauts with their very young children – which does raise a bit of a problem. The plot largely focuses on the impact of bringing your child to work when you spend half your day in a spacesuit at the bottom of a swimming pool. “Cut the cord!” cries the absurdly chauvinistic NASA astronaut Mike Shannon (Matt Dillon) when Loreau has to go chasing after her young daughter.
Yet here is photographic evidence that suggests Loreau’s real-life counterparts – Yelena Kondakova, Ellen Ochoa, Cady Coleman and Naoko Yamazaki – managed perfectly well on multiple missions without all of Proxima‘s turmoil. Wouldn’t we have been better off seeing the realities they faced rather than watching Loreau, in the film’s final moments, break Baikonur’s safety protocols in order to steal a feel-good, audience-pandering mother-daughter moment?
For half a century, movies have struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing realities of the space sector. Proxima, though interesting and boasting a tremendous central performance from Green, proves to be no more relevant than its forebears.
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By Michael Marshall

The distribution of slavery in southern US states in 1860
Niday Picture Library / Alamy

A study of the DNA of people in the Americas with African heritage has revealed overlooked details about the transatlantic slave trade.
“This gives some clarity and some sense of individual history,” says historian Linda Heywood of Boston University in Massachusetts, who wasn’t involved in the research. DNA evidence means African Americans can pinpoint where their ancestors were abducted from and reclaim aspects of their heritage that were hidden by the slave trade, she says. “It broadens the way in which identity and personal history can be thought about.”
An estimated 12.5 million people were taken from Africa to the Americas between the 1500s and 1800s, according to historical texts like shipping documents and records of people being sold.

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To fill out the picture, Steven Micheletti of consumer genetics firm 23andMe in Sunnyvale, California, and his colleagues looked at DNA from 50,281 people, including 27,422 people from across the Americas with a minimum of 5 per cent African ancestry, 20,942 Europeans and 1917 Africans. This allowed them to identify stretches of DNA that are unique to people from particular regions of Africa.
The data came from 23andMe customers, along with public genome databases. Studies like this are becoming possible because African people, who were previously under-represented in genome databases, are now being asked to take part in research, says Joanna Mountain, also of 23andMe. Nevertheless, gaps remain. “I’m hoping we get some data from Mozambique sometime soon. It was involved in the slave trade, but we didn’t have enough data to include it in this study,” she says.

In line with historical records of where slaves were taken from, the African DNA in people in the Americas was most similar to that of people living in west African countries like Senegal, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola.
However, most people in the Americas with African ancestry won’t have DNA from a single region of Africa. “Our results suggest the average African American would have connections to multiple regions,” says Micheletti. That is partly because slave traders disregarded ethnic identities, mixing people from different groups, and partly because African Americans moved around within the US. For instance, during the Great Migration of the 20th century African Americans moved from the segregated southern states of the US to northern states.
Because so many people were abducted as slaves, much of the genetic diversity in Africa was carried to the Americas, says Eduardo Tarazona-Santos at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. “But within the Americas, this diversity was more homogenised between populations.”

The analysis points to overlooked details of the slave trade. For instance, the team found less DNA from Senegal, Gambia and regions in other neighbouring countries than would be expected given the huge numbers of people taken from there. This may be because those slaves were often taken to rice plantations in the US, where the death rate was high due to malaria, says the team.

Meanwhile, many people in Central and South America and on many Caribbean islands today carry little African DNA – despite the fact that 70 per cent of slaves who survived the trip to the Americas were sent there.
This may reflect a form of racism once practised in Brazil, says Mountain, in which women of African descent were raped or forced to marry Europeans to promote “racial whitening”. In contrast, in the US, African Americans were often segregated from white people by law, and racial intermarriage was illegal or taboo.
The genetic data also confirms that female slaves have passed on much more of their DNA than male slaves – even though historical records show the majority of people taken from Africa were male. This is probably because female slaves were subjected to rape and sexual exploitation.
Journal reference: American Journal of Human Genetics, DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2020.06.012
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