Our Lady Who Burns

In the middle of the Atlantic, Helena rekindles an old friendship with Ceu, an astrophysicist who recently relocated to the Azorean island of Santa Maria to study exoplanets. Caught between the island’s geological inheritance and the vastness of the cosmos, the two friends reconcile with the various space exploration infrastructures that are stationed on the island. A work of science-fiction inspired by the various space resources currently existing in Santa Maria, See You Later Space Island is a loose tale of friendship and endurance.

A soul waits to be reincarnated while reflecting back on her past life as a nun, who worked at the Vatican Astronomical Observatory in early-20th century. There, she took part in the “Carte du Ciel” — an ambitious international project to map the night sky, earning the early title of “computer” as a result of processing repetitive calculations. Disillusioned with her previous existence, she considers becoming a coder in her next life, amidst the wave of economic optimism awaiting her reincarnation in 1990s Portugal. Shot on 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.

Sprung from the artist’s own family history, "For a Life Long Disease of Copper" extrapolates the media of essay-film and sci-fi drama to both recount and fictionalize their grandmother’s life story as a worker at a pharmaceutical factory in Lisbon during the 1960s and 1970s where, among other pharmaceuticals, she fabricated the company’s first birth-control pill.

The world population of captive axolotl has had enough of the aggressive electric lights of their aquariums. Communicating via wireless waves and watching anime telepathically, they decide to develop eyelids to shut their eyes, reclaim the agency of their bodies and encourage empathic communication. Alice dos Reis’ Mood Keep imagines this collective moment of rebellion and resistance of the endangered salamanders.