North American Premiere
Between one life and the next, a soul reflects on a past shaped by faith, repetition, and the quiet labour of observation. At the end of the 19th century, the Vatican assembled four nuns to map the sky — a monumental effort of performing rigorous calculations that positioned women as human “computers.” The promise of technological progress in the 1990s emerges not as a rupture, but as an uncanny continuation of the same systems of order, belief, and labour.
Filmed with visual dissonance between 16mm and a smartphone, Oh Be a Fine Girl Kiss Me moves between historical fiction and autobiography, collapsing distinctions between astronomy and computation, devotion and technology, memory and speculation. Director Alice dos Reis frames the invisible architectures that shape human lives, revealing modernity not as a succession of innovations but as an enduring constellation of inherited structures, aspirations, and constraints.
Elsa Compaoré, Margarida Lucas, Sara Silva
Portugal
2026
No Dialogue
This short is featured in:
MODES 2
At the intersection of culture, technology, and capital, a yearning for human connection and the possibility of release endures.
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Credits & Director
Producer
Catarina de Sousa, Isadora Neves Marques
Screenwriter
Alice dos Reis
Cinematography
Alice dos Reis
Editor
Alice dos Reis
Alice dos Reis
Alice dos Reis, born 1995 in Lisbon, is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work has been presented internationally at festivals including the BFI London Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Sheffield DocFest, and the Melbourne International Film Festival. Her films and visual art have also been featured in exhibitions at institutions such as the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Porto), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and the EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam).
MODES
See more shorts in this series
MODES 1
Archive and the land reveal other ways of seeing, ensuring that what is meant to endure cannot be erased.
MODES 2
At the intersection of culture, technology, and capital, a yearning for human connection and the possibility of release endures.
MODES 3
Interior worlds reveal wisdom, intuitive connections, the esoteric, and death. Or is it liberation? A bid to commune with the feminine, other realms, and ghosts.