Rioja Neanderthalensis
2025 · 3m
Directed by Antonio Miguel Moreno Hidalgo
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, provocative, surreal
Using time-lapse and other techniques, the film races at a frenetic rhythm from the future back to the remotest past — the Neanderthal era and the first steps of early humans in the region now known as La Rioja — with a critical undertow about human evolution and its footprint on planet Earth.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Time-lapse-as-philosophical-cudgel is exactly the kind of move that feels clever until you realize it's been done, but Hidalgo's backwards sprint through geological time with a Rioja-specific throughline has enough subversive bite to dodge the obvious—the real provocation is asking us to feel complicit in *our own* evolution.
A precise formal inversion of the essay film tradition: rather than moving chronologically through argument, Rioja Neanderthalensis uses temporal collapse and regional specificity to situate human presence within deep time, positioning itself alongside works like Godard's essay pieces that weaponize technique to rethink historical narrative.
The frenetic rhythm is the entire architecture here—that decision to accelerate backward rather than plod forward transforms what could've been a standard nature doc into something that *feels* like vertigo, and the choice to anchor it to one region's archaeology gives the abstraction a foothold.