Walter Salles’ camera is so closely and empathetically engaged with his characters in I’m Still Here that he makes us feel like we’re a member of their family. In doing so, The Motorcycle Diaries director transforms his first narrative feature in 12 years into a heartbreakingly intimate drama about personal tragedy wrought from national evil. His aesthetics in perfect harmony with his beleaguered protagonists, it’s a peerless example of using exacting form to not simply inform and enhance content, but to create a profound link between movie and moviegoer.
Brazil’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards—and receiving a one-week awards-qualifying run beginning Nov. 22 ahead of its proper Jan. 17, 2025 theatrical release—I’m Still Here is a based-on-true-events story about the ways in which tyranny punishes and scars, the horrors of both knowing and not knowing, and the pains that never leave, the losses that never heal, and the voids that are never filled.
Far from a punishing ordeal, however, Salles’ latest is also a rousing tribute to never forgetting, never quitting on the truth or loved ones, and never bowing down before the forces of intolerance and oppression. Electrified by Fernanda Torres’ performance as a woman who endured the worst and embodied the best, it’s an import of timely urgency and universal power.
In 1970, Rubens Pavia (Selton Mello) is a civil engineer and former congressman who lives in a boisterous house with his wife Eunice (Torres), their daughters Vera (Valentina Herszage), Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), Nalu (Barbara Luz), and Maria (Cora Mora), and their sole son Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira), whose 2015 book forms the basis of Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega’s script.
Although a military helicopter flying overhead while Eunice floats in the water portends future trouble, theirs is a happy life, and Salles immerses us in it through a series of scenes on the beach and in and around their house. Whether following Marcel as the boy scoops up a stray dog and races home to show him to his dad, or situating viewers in-between the children as they sit around an ice cream parlor table, the director initiates us into this clan and their boisterous day-to-day, thereby heightening our familiarity with, and fondness for, them.
For its first half-hour, I’m Still Here plays as a domestic drama, charting the ups and downs of the Pavias as they visit with friends and prepare to say goodbye to their eldest, Vera, who’s relocating to London. That development is sad, but the family greets it head-on, just as they continue to enjoy themselves amidst the growing threat of dictatorship. On the beach, a group photograph is taken as they cheer “Ditch the Dictators!”, and things proceed on an even track regardless of the fact that Rubens appears to be covertly sending and receiving mysterious envelopes.
Their peace and quiet is shattered forever on Jan. 20, 1971, when a cadre of armed men arrive at their residence to take Rubens to a “deposition” whose nature they won’t reveal. He dutifully complies without letting his kids think that anything’s wrong, even letting Nalu help him fix his tie and shirt collar. But Eunice knows this is ominous, and her suspicion is confirmed when some of these agents remain in the house as de facto prison guards.
Eunice puts on a brave face for her brood, yet things quickly go from bad to worse when she and Eliana are taken (with bags over their heads) to a remote location for questioning. Though this suffering is terrible, what’s worse is Eunice’s eventual return to a life marked by secrets and lies—both those committed against her and her husband, and those she’s forced to commit to avoid creating additional trouble for herself and to shield her younger kids from the reality of their situation. In I’m Still Here, totalitarian cruelty doesn’t simply take the form of kidnapping, torture, and murder; it comes via denials and silence, which its victims are compelled to perpetuate against each other.
Salles captures the mechanics of authoritarianism via Eunice’s nightmare, and Torres evokes the matriarch’s desperation and perseverance with a steeliness that’s colored by tremendous sorrow. Still, the greatness of her turn doesn’t become apparent until I’m Still Here’s later passages, during which Eunice learns of Rubens’ fate and is powerless to do anything about it—or, even, to speak it aloud.
In the character’s attempts to hold her family together while simultaneously searching for evidence that might substantiate the government’s homicidal crime against Rubens, Torres reveals layers of thought and emotion with no more than a sideways glance, a far-off stare, or an appreciative nod. That’s even truer when the film leaps forward to 1996 to depict her triumphant acquisition of a death certificate for Rubens—a document that proves he existed and, also, that she never gave up on him.
I’m Still Here is an affirmation of an atrocity and a celebration of one wife and mother’s refusal to let it stand, and it melds uplift and anguish to stirring effect. In a 2014-set coda, Eunice is now an elderly grandmother played by Fernanda Montenegro, confined to a wheelchair and seemingly adrift in a worsening Alzheimer’s haze. Gazing at her grandson, her eyes suggest a melancholy swirl of recollections about the past and its many ghosts. No matter her confusion, when she’s left alone in front of the television and sees her husband’s picture displayed in a news report about a commission’s findings on Brazil’s dictatorship, it’s as if a lightbulb goes on inside her mind, and Salles depicts her temporary reawakening with a gentleness that’s almost unbearably poignant.
Decades earlier during a photo shoot for a magazine article, Eunice is told that the editor wants the family to look sad, and she objects, insisting that everyone smile. That demand is repeated on more than one subsequent occasion, and with the same subtly that he brings to the entire film, Salles posits it as his heroine’s sly articulation of resilience and rebellion. With I’m Still Here, the director honors Eunice with a moving portrait of all that was taken from her, all that was lost, and all that she did to fight, to rebuild, and to remember.