“Before everything, it was dark. Then God started playing and making all things up, and he made the man from the dust, and the woman from the man.” The Berlin Film Festival‘s Generation Kplus program this year opens with The Fabulous Time Machine (A Fabulosa Máquina do Tempo), and Eliza Capai’s new feature documentary opens with those words.
Set in the arid Brazilian hinterland, it shows girls playing “between their moms’ miserable past and fantastic dreams of the future,” according to a synopsis of the film. “Despite living in houses with dirt floors, without tap water, amid the aridity of the Brazilian sertão, they state that they were born with perks – able to eat, study, play, and dream of better futures.”
And its 10-year-old narrator wonders in the opening moments if women would be different if they were made from dust, too.
Why is the movie called The Fabulous Time Machine? Well, the girls invent time machines to travel to the past and question their realities, playfully dealing with such complex issues as gender differences, alcoholism, and religion. And they joke about frustration, fears, and death. Amid a fear of becoming teenagers, they even decide to travel to the future and “envision their happy dreams of becoming independent and successful women.”
The Fabulous Time Machine comes from Brazilian production company Amana Cine and is the sole Generation title and the only Brazilian doc at Berlin 2026 nominated for the Berlinale Documentary Award. THR can now debut an exclusive clip for the film ahead of the Berlin festival, which runs Feb. 12-22.
Split Screen is handling world sales on the film, produced by Mariana Ganescá for Brazil’s Amana Cine, in partnership and co-production with Globo Filmes/GloboNews and Canal Brasil.
“In 2013, I filmed a short in the pilot city for Brazil’s income distribution program, which lifted the country off the UN Hunger Map,” Capai says about the genesis of The Fabulous Time Machine. “I captured women who described their past as ‘slavery: no food, no sandals, nothing,’ alongside their healthy daughters who went to school and ate three meals a day – marking the dawn of a historic shift.”
Eleven years later, “I returned for an audiovisual workshop with girls, exploring their homes, schools, and churches together,” the filmmaker explains. “The key challenge in filming and editing was turning it into their big game: seeing poverty’s escape and structural sexism through their eyes, tackling universal fears like death, God, or life’s choices – marriage or a puppy? – from the heart of childhood adventure.”
Are you ready for some cinematic time travel? If so, here is the exclusive clip for The Fabulous Time Machine.
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