Mother and daughter bear a nation's trauma in Oscar-winning comeback.
What’s remarkable is how [Torres] never overplays anything, or goes for easy histrionics and rending of garments even when the movie itself becomes heavy-handed in the back half. --Rolling Stone, David Fear
The realisation that her husband is gone for good is a gradual process that plays out, largely without words, on Torres’s face, in a performance of extraordinary intelligence and emotional complexity. --The Observer (UK), Wendy Ide
Brazilian director Walter Salles was shaped by the ideals he encountered in the Paiva family home, which is depicted in I’m Still Here. When family-patriarch Rúben was kidnapped by the military dictatorship, it was an abrupt and momentous awakening.
Walter Salles directs Fernanda Torres as lawyer Eunice Paiva in I'm Still Here, which earned the actress an Oscar nomination. Photo | VideoFilmes
The Brazilian drama, which has been given five stars by Ekko’s reviewer and won an Oscar for best international film in March, depicts the trauma left behind by the country's brutal military dictatorship. The film is based on the authentic story of the progressive, wealthy Páiva family.
Their home near the beach in Rio de Janeiro was a focal point and refuge for the city's anti-regime artists and politicians. The husband, Rúben, is an opposition politician and a prominent voice against the regime that had been in power for six years since 1970. He supports politicians in exile, and when the military tightens its grip on power, he is arrested.
When his wife Eunice asks for him, she is also taken away with her daughter. She is tortured and released without charge. But she refuses to bow her head, and her strength holds the family together to this day.
"It's about a woman who reinvents herself," says Walter Salles in a roundtable interview at the Venice Film Festival shortly after the film's world premiere in 2024. "She is the silent hero throughout their 40-year journey," says the director.
A Constantly Growing World
The film is based on the book by the same name, in which author Marcelo Rubens Paivatells the story of his parents, and especially his mother. But it also draws on Walter Salles’ own memories of the Paiva family.
He had spent his early childhood in Paris, where his father worked as a banker and diplomat. When they returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1969, thirteen-year-old Walter was drawn to the bold atmosphere of the Paiva family home.
“There was so much life in their house. Music, political discussions, everything that didn’t exist in my family. Their door was always open. Every day you ran into people you didn’t know, but who made your world bigger. My world was constantly growing,” says Walter Salles, moved as he looks back.
“I am shaped by films and by the Paiva family home. That’s how I grew up.”
It was also with his family that he truly became aware of the kind of country he lived in.
With American help, the military had seized power in 1964 and held it until 1985. When Walter Salles returned to his homeland, the regime had begun to crack down hard on the opposition.
It is this escalation of surveillance and police harassment that is depicted in the first half of I’m Still Here. The friends of the Paiva family feel the government breathing down their necks and seek refuge abroad before it is too late.
Thousands of alleged critics of the regime were tortured and hundreds killed without trial or notification to the family.
“The significance of the military dictatorship hit me when Ruben disappeared. That’s where the political and human drama came together, because I realized that the regime could decide who to live and who to die. And there’s nothing you can do!”
Social commitment
Walter Salles managed to avoid the regime's enemies' lists. Perhaps because he was born into one of the country's oldest and richest financial families.
He studied economics before meeting the Paiva family circle sent him in a more cultural direction. In the mid-70s, he traveled to California to study film, and when he returned home, he directed commercials and documentaries on the topics that interested him.
He made a TV series about the history of Japan, just as the country's industry was taking the world by storm. And hour-long portraits of Brazilian musicians and poets, as well as TV interviews with filmmakers such as Federico Fellini.
"I see myself as a documentarian who occasionally creates fiction,"Walter Salles explains today.
Two years after the fall of the dictatorship, he started a film company with his brother, the documentarian João Moreira Salles, and in 1995 Walter Salles scored a regular festival hit with the drama Foreign Land.
It was his first collaboration with Fernanda Torres, who this year was nominated for an Oscar for best acctress for her role as Eunice in I’m Still Here– 25 years after her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, received the same award for her leading role in Walter Salles’ international breakthrough, Central Station.
Central Station is about a bitter, middle-aged woman who takes care of a young boy after his mother’s death. It is a good example of his empathetic, socially committed filmmaking.
Later came the honor killing story Behind the Sun and TheMotorcycle Diaries, in which a young Che Guevara goes on a political education journey in a poor, class-divided South America. The film became an international hit in 2004, also luring Danes to the box office.
Walter Salles borrowed some of the success from the routine American horror remake Dark Water, and although both the brother portrait Linha de Passe and the Jack Kerouac film adaptation On the Road were selected for Cannes’ main competition, both films were overlooked.
Brazilian cinema silent for four years
It took Walter Salles twelve years to make his next film. But the fact that I’m Still Here was many years in the making doesn’t mean he’s been idle. He lists a number of projects. There’s the documentary A Guy from Fenyang, about the Chinese director Jia Zhiangke. There were the many years he spent developing The Girl Who Told the Story, which Lone Scherfig ended up directing.
He’s currently working on a five-hour TV series about the footballer Sócrates, who played an important role in the re-establishment of democracy in Brazil. And when it’s finished, he’ll have another script ready to shoot.
“I’m a filmmaker to whom it takes a long time to be satisfied with a script. I need to be able to see the film in my mind in an inner cinema before I can shoot it,” explains the 69-year-old director.
For a long time, it wasn’t just the director’s perfectionism, but also Brazil’s political reality that put a brake on the project. During Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency from 2019 to 2023, it became difficult again to make films that spoke against the interests of power.
“Brazilian cinema was silent for four years,” says Walter Salles sadly.
The government cut film subsidies and refused to grant permission to shoot critical film productions. As an artist with international influence and progressive ideas, it was difficult for Walter Salles to be allowed to create a film about the military dictatorship that Bolsonaro often praised.
“You need permission to be able to shoot in the streets – especially when it’s a period film. I needed freedom, also because I didn’t want it to feel like a period film. My own impression of that house and that family is not historical, and I wanted it to feel alive, also in the streets. And for four years, that just wasn’t possible.”
Nostalgia for the dictatorship
At the same time, Walter Salles knew that Bolsonaro’s popularity made his film very relevant and important. I’m Still Here shows how the regime’s crimes leave traces of blood in the present, where many on the political right have rosy memories of the military dictatorship.
“I never imagined that this personal project would be so much about today’s Brazil. Because we were very close to reinstating the dictatorship,” says Walter Salles.
He refers to the partly Danish-produced documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics, which can be seen on Netflix. It depicts how the evangelical church led Bolsonaro to the presidency as a savior and culminates in a storming of the Brazilian parliament building in 2023, which is confusingly reminiscent of what American Trump supporters committed on January 6, 2021.
Just as Trump denied losing the US election, Bolsonaro refused to hand over power to his democratically elected successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The aftermath, however, was markedly different in the two countries. While Trump returned to power, Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison last month for attempted coups.
“I never imagined that Trump wouldn't pay for what he caused. In my opinion, it shows that democracy in the United States is absolutely fragile,” says Walter Salles.
Civil Courage
His own film shows that this observation does not only apply to Americans. If anything, I’m Still Hereshows that democratic values and rights are always fragile and under threat.
After her husband’s disappearance, Eunice Paiva studied law and became a prominent defender of the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon. She fought throughout her life to cut through the bureaucracy and hold the state accountable for her husband’s fate. To force the confrontation that is necessary if society is to heal.
For Walter Salles, the Paiva family’s resilience and civic courage are a shining example of how to keep the conversation going.
He pays tribute to them in the heartbreaking final scene, where the Paiva family meets for lunch in 2014.
Many of the family members play themselves, while Fernanda Montenegro, now 96, takes on the role of her daughter Fernanda Torres, playing an Alzheimer’s-stricken Eunice left with painful memories.
Antidote to misinformation
In Brazil, I’m Still Herehas been caught up in the same culture war it depicts. The left is praising it as a much-needed showdown, while the right is writing it off as criticizing an authoritarian regime.
Speaking shortly after its world premiere, Walter Salles is prepared for a mixed reception in his home country. But for him, the important thing is that his film deals seriously with its subject, so that it can give others the opportunity to do the same.
“Automatic reactions on social media control much of the public debate. People are constantly bombarded with new images that demand their opinion on things they don’t have time to analyze in depth.”
“Society has become more complex. But you can also look at it positively. We live in a time when it’s important to make films, write and be creative. If there’s an antidote to misinformation, it’s art,”Walter Salles insists.
“As a friend of mine says, ‘We had the Middle Ages, and it was tough. But then we had the Renaissance. So I just hope we get there again!’”
(Translated from Danish to English by Online Film Home)
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