I’m Still Here is the first 2024 film I’ve seen after making my 2024 top ten list that definitely would have made it on the list had I seen it in time. Director Walter Salles’ simultaneously heartbreaking and inspiring portrait of a true hero from his native Brazil is brimming with honesty and grace, and is absolutely worthy of its Best Picture and Best International Feature Oscar nominations. I’m now hoping its star, Fernanda Torres, wins Best Actress.
Torres plays Eunice Paiva, an activist and lawyer whose family was targeted when Brazil’s 21-year-long military dictatorship began. Eunice’s husband Rubens (Selton Mello), himself a former politician, was abducted in January 1971, suspected of communist connections. Eunice and her daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) were also abducted and interrogated; Eunice was released after twelve days of imprisonment and Eliana was released after one. The large family’s once-idyllic seaside life in Rio de Janeiro soon became anything but idyllic. Years of no answers as to Rubens’ whereabouts turned into decades, and the film concludes with Eunice and her children finally discovering the reality of the situation.
What’s inspiring about both the real-life Paiva and Torres’ portrayal of her story is her fortitude in keeping her family together and safe through all of this intimidation and uncertainty. She spent the latter half of her life as a lawyer, graduating from law school at 47 years old and using her training and skills to push for the release of records from the years of the military dictatorship. As dark as what she and her family went through was, she realized that she was not the only victim, and it’s incredibly uplifting to see how she turned pain into progress.
Most of the film, however, centers on the Paivas’ beautiful life in Rio and how it all came crashing down in 1971. Torres shifts Eunice into so many wonderfully subtle gears as the challenges of motherhood escalate due to these forces beyond her control. Salles’ and cinematographer Adrian Teijido’s attention to detail turns the family’s home into a character in itself. We come to feel like we know so much of their inner lives; almost like we’re a member of the Paiva family ourselves. At times, Teijido’s camera locks onto particular characters exclusively as they move through the house, and there’s something about this technique that really endears us to said characters. Of course, this also contributes to the heartbreak we feel when Rubens is abducted and we see everything Eunice is left to cope with.
There’s also an emotional attention to detail in the sense of the kinds of short stories the film tells before the family is broken up. I can only assume many of these came from the book I’m Still Here by Marcelo Paiva (one of Eunice and Rubens’ children who went on to become a famous author; the child version here played by Guilherme Silveira, and the adult version by Antonio Saboia) on which the film is based. For example, one daughter’s tooth falls out at one point, and later, as the family is having a bon voyage beach party for an older daughter, Rubens pretends to bury the tooth for them to find later, and as the young daughter runs off to take a group picture, he quickly digs up the tooth and saves it in his pocket. It’s a typical kind of pleasantly funny parent-child interaction, but one which takes on a whole new meaning when Rubens is abducted. That child deserved to find her tooth again with her father. Wondrous, innocent moments like that are why Eunice fought for her family and so many others. It’s why she was still there fighting after so many years of pain.
| George Napper
In Portuguese with English subtitles
