Lazarus Taxon
2008 · 15m · España
Directed by Denis Rovira
Genres: adventure, drama, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
After the feared climate change, a man crosses the New Sea trying to save his dying daughter, in a tale about the limits of the human being and the survival of the species.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Lazarus Taxon feels like it's genuflecting to mythology and climate anxiety in equal measure—which is exactly the kind of middlebrow earnestness that usually makes me roll my eyes, except Rovira's actually earned it by refusing to comfort us with a rescue narrative.
This is essential work: a film that inherits the contemplative patience of New Wave sci-fi while speaking directly to our moment, all achieved through rigorous formal restraint and a mythic sensibility that knows exactly which traditions it's in conversation with.
The decision to shoot this on what reads as a shoestring across actual water—letting the daughter's frailty and the father's desperation live in the space between camera and body, rather than in exposition—is the kind of constraint-as-clarity move that separates craft from budget.