Entertainment Review: I’m Still Here

Walter Salles, the great Brazilian director, who made films like Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, returned to filmmaking after a long gap, and delivered an Oscar-winning film, about that period of terror and uncertainty, as a family copes with the arrest and disappearance of the father.  It is based on the 2015 memoir by Marcelo Paiva, the youngest son of Rubens Paiva, who was taken in for “deposition” and never returned. His wife and children were left to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.

The 2024 winner of the Academy Award for Best International Film, which also earned nominations for Best Actress (Fernanda Torres) and Best Picture, has dropped on Amazon Prime Video and is worth a watch.

The director eschews the hysteria of most political thrillers, and chooses instead to focus on the agonizing silence that follows the disappearance of Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello); the military establishment refuses to answer questions and even well-meaning friends express their helplesses. Paiva’s wife Eunice desperately wants to know what happened to her husband, as she holds together her family of five children.

I’m Still Here begins by portraying a happy family living by the beach in  sun-drenched Rio de Janeiro. Music fills the air, friends drop by for parties and the atmosphere is joyous. The sound of helicopters over the beach or a military convoy on the street is background noise to be ignored. But when the state finally knocks on the door, there is a stunning transition from domestic bliss to Kafkaesque nightmare. The men who take over the Paiva house are polite and accommodating, but make no promises of his return.

When Eunice Paiva starts asking questions, she and one of her teenage daughters are taken to an undisclosed place with hoods over their heads. She is eventually detained herself for two weeks, suffering the psychological toll of isolation and fear.

The child is sent home, Eunice is released, but Rubens does not come back. She has to navigate a system that refuses to acknowledge her husband’s existence, even as his car is parked in the compound of the military complex.

Torres plays Eunice as a woman with dignity and immense courage. At the age of 48, she became a lawyer to fight the state. For her kids, falling apart as they have to leave their home and the carefree lives they led, she is a rock of patience and compassion. She refuses to be a martyr and prevents the family from descending into a pit of despair. When a newspaper photographer asks them to look serious for the picture he is clicking, she insists that they smile.

Still, it is a long and lonely battle for answers, for justice– when she finally gets a death certificate, she is relieved that the state, at last, acknowledged its complicity in the death of her husband, even though the men responsible were never arrested or punished.

Years later, in 2014, she is battling Alzheimer’s– the older version played by, Fernanda Montenegro, Torres’s real-life mother and the star of Central Station. It is as if the woman who fought for decades to make the  state remember what it did to her husband, now wants to forget the trauma she held in her mind and body for so long. Her resilience ensured that her children grew up happy — the son was confined to a wheelchair after an accident, but went on to have a successful career as a writer.

The film is so powerful, because it is matter-of-fact, not manipulative– it expects the audience to understand what is left unsaid. The film is in Portuguese (with English subtitles) and set in Brazil, but the story could be taking place in any country under a corrupt and autocratic system