Relicto

“At 105, Sixto Muñoz, known as ‘the last Tinigua man’, left his home for one final journey into the Amazon and disappeared. Following his trail along the Guayabero River, the film retraces his fading world and the extinction of an entire culture.”

What remains of Sixto Muñoz, the last survivor of the Tinigua people, who lived in the Macarena massif in the northern Amazon? After learning that he disappeared mysteriously from a canoe on a river, Guillermo Quintero sets out in search of this last guardian of an indigenous language and culture, while bringing to life the collective imaginary that Muñoz continues to inspire. Taking as his starting point a photograph and a report written by a couple of linguists, Quintero visits the places where this centenarian is said to have lived before the trail went cold. Through the stories of those who knew him (farmers and Colombian inhabitants of the Macarena), a story and a character begin to emerge. The spectral figure of Muñoz – who is sometimes described in human terms, and sometimes conferred legendary status – seems to embody a long process of cultural erasure: from the arrival of the Catalan monks who gave him the name Sixto (instead of Sisithio, ‘the knife’), to the massacre of his tribe by the bandit La Palma, to the sale of his land and his refusal to pass on his language to his children. An enigmatic treasure trail in the heart of the lagoons and winding paths of the jungle, the film turns absence and invisibility into material that sometimes borders on the fantastical. In the tension between modernity and ancestral knowledge, imagination and historical reality, the film subtly unearths the story of colonial dissolution and devastation. 

Nepheli Gambade