“A hauntingly beautiful effort to record what is left, in the hopes of it never being entirely forgotten.”

Those of us who have an interest in history will be familiar with the fact that countless civilisations have gone extinct. What we don’t often realise is that this is not purely a phenomenon that occurred in the past, and there are still cultures that continue to decline, to the point where their populations are shrinking and centuries of history are being lost as their members die. Jimmy Nelson set out to explore this in his book Before They Pass Away, where he photographed members of communities across the world that are slowly fading, in the hopes of at least having their stories recorded for posterity. We find a similar approach when looking at the life of Sixto Muñoz, considered the last remaining member of the Tinigua people of Colombia, who have gradually been lost to time. Reportedly over one hundred years old and living a reclusive lifestyle, Sixto represents the final vestige of a culture that he has seen decline, leaving him as the sole survivor. Filmmaker Guillermo Quintero saw the importance of telling this story and voyaged to Sixto’s home in the hopes of capturing as much of this man and his culture as possible – only to realise that Sixto had mysteriously disappeared, leaving by canoe months earlier, voyaging into the Amazon without leaving a trace. What follows is Relicto, a poignant exploration of the past told primarily through the recollections of the community that surrounded Sixto, and a documentary that reveals the importance of cultural preservation and doing whatever is possible to tell these stories before it is too late, an endeavour that exists at the intersection between anthropology and existential philosophy.

The film opens with a scientific definition of the term “relict”, which means the last remaining specimen that has survived while all others in its group have perished over time. We don’t often use the term to refer to people, but in the case of Sixto it has some relevance, at least metaphorically, since he is indeed a relict of a culture that has now been almost entirely extinguished. For populations in Latin America, the combination of colonialism and globalisation has meant that cultures have begun to influence each other, and the modern world has led many people to seek opportunities elsewhere, leaving very little space for these older cultures to grow and causing rapid decline over the years. The idea of centuries of culture being carried by a single person, who is now in the final stages of his own life, is an intimidating thought and the core premise for Relicto. Quintero chooses to examine the burden that comes with being the last remaining survivor of a culture, saddled with the knowledge that every tradition is held in their memory, and where centuries of customs, languages and histories will perish once this person dies. It’s not an easy subject, but Quintero finds fascinating ways to explore it from various angles, particularly since Sixto is absent for almost the entirety of the project, leaving the director to craft a film that functions as the search for an individual, while in the process unearthing deeper truths about culture, colonialism and the volatile nature of the past.

Despite the film being about his disappearance, as told by those who either knew him or were aware of his existence, there does come a point in Relicto when we get to meet Sixto himself. It comes eighty minutes into the film, after most of it has passed, and despite having spent over an hour talking with people who described him as some folkloric figure, we see that Sixto is entirely nondescript. An ordinary man who wanders the town built on the site that once was home to many more of his people – someone caught in the liminal space between the past and the present, not realising that he is the final bridge between the two. In those final twelve minutes everything about Relicto comes together, when all the recollections from dozens of people interviewed throughout the film are woven into a historical tapestry that is now given tangible form. Centuries of culture reduced to a single person who carries an unbearable weight as custodian of the past, his existence representing the final act of curation, the memory of everyone who came before him. It’s an intimidating concept, but the director nonetheless manages to capture it on film by presenting Sixto’s routine, wordless and simple, and not unlike the daily activities of the other people who surround him. It’s a stunning sequence that closes the film, starkly contrasting the image painted by the other interviewees, who positioned him as some mythological entity; but he is shown here to be simply someone living their life, the audience never privy to whether or not he is aware of the staggering importance of his existence and what it represents.

It isn’t often that a moment in a film can inspire a near existential panic in the viewer, especially one that is delivered quietly and with seemingly no intention to upset us. Yet, the final scene of Relicto contains one of the most unsettling moments, when we finally hear Sixto speaking – for a brief moment, we wonder why no subtitles are translating what he says, and why the director isn’t adding any context to what he is saying. Then we realise that, as he is the last speaker of the language, probably no one else can offer a translation, meaning that his words, despite being recorded on film, are likely to remain a mystery to us. This moment ends the film, and in many ways summarises everything that the director set out to explore, linguistically, culturally and philosophically. Most of us are fortunate to come from cultures that have long recorded histories and contain more than enough native speakers to never be at risk of fading away, something that is easy to take for granted. It is only when presented with a film like Relicto, as we witness not only an informative exploration of customs and traditions, but also an attempt to capture the final remnants of a culture through examining its last living member and the places that defined his life, that the gravity of the situation becomes clear. This is an exceptionally important piece of filmmaking, a harrowing portrait of cultural extinction in the form of a hauntingly beautiful effort to record what is left, in the hopes of it never being entirely forgotten.