Shot in 16mm film and smartphone, Oh Be a Fine Girl Kiss Me blends historical fiction and autobiography in a meditation on life’s choices and constraints, as well as on the systems and categories that shaped modernity.
The narrator is made soul to communicate with us the memory of a past life in her reincarnation as a nun. Time flows with the images to reach the words that narrate her story alongside three other nuns – the “Machines of God”. They were summoned by the Vatican Observatory to map and catalogue the stars in the sky. The images shift through colour, movement, flickering, constellations of light, objects, figures and real people: the nuns. Fiction, facts and autobiography intersect; different timeframes cross paths; centuries are traversed, and this entire micro-universe concentrates and intensifies to articulate thoughts and reflections that travel in a time machine. (Carlota Gonçalves)
