‘I’m Still Here’ Frames a Family in Crisis During Brazil’s Military Dictatorship

The aim of a photograph is to record a moment in the lives of its subjects. In I’m Still Here (opening Jan. 24), Brazilian director Walter Salles’ deeply moving film adapted from Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir, the absence of a family’s key figure is as palpable as everyone else’s presence.

Unfolding in the early 1970s as Brazil’s military dictatorship consolidates its repressive, murderous rule, I’m Still Here is less about a freedom-strangling government than a mother desperate to limit its destructive effects on her family. Although it’s impossible to separate the personal from the political in this exquisitely crafted memory piece, Salles’ primary focus is the Paiva family home and dynamic.

The filmmaker’s discipline is noteworthy from a current-events standpoint: Salles was working on I’m Still Here at the same time that right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro — inspired by a kindred chief executive 4,000 miles to the north — falsely alleged voter fraud and sought to stay in power after he lost a runoff for reelection in 2022.

Bolsonaro won’t be top of mind for most U.S. viewers, though, notwithstanding I’m Still Here’s Brazilian pedigree. If the film’s release was timed to capitalize on the announcement of the Oscar nominations — it received nods for Best Picture, Best International Feature Film and Best Actress — it also coincides with the inauguration of a U.S. president who once promised during his campaign to be a dictator on day one.

The film opens on a sun-drenched Rio de Janeiro beach at the paradisiacal height of summer, the air filled with the teasing and laughter of adolescents playing volleyball. The high-pitched voices don’t disturb the mother, Eunice, floating blissfully in the ocean. What does summon her to attention is the military helicopter slicing through the sky overhead.

We never forget this ominous bit of foreshadowing, even as Salles devotes 30 minutes to assembling a scrapbook of happy family interactions. Slightly washed out to evoke the passage of time, and intercut with equally faded Super 8 images that Vera, the oldest sibling of five, collects with the camera she takes everywhere, they don’t exude nostalgia so much as the joy and thrill of life before the apocalypse.

Marcelo, the incorrigible lone son (and future writer), adopts a stray dog. Ruben (Selton Mello), the father, a civil engineer and former congressman, is the warm, genial center of the family. Eunice (Fernanda Torres, who won Best Dramatic Movie Actress at the reconstituted, somewhat less sketchy Golden Globes) is the household’s no-nonsense rock and anchor.

Eunice is much more than a disciplinarian, but the fact that she’s always home with the children while Ruben’s at work inevitably makes his return from the office the highlight of the day. Furthermore, Ruben has that magic knack of turning every encounter with his kids into a private, special moment, and transforming the everyday into a memory. There’s a marvelous scene when the youngest daughter, Babiu, loses a baby tooth, and she and Ruben bury it in the sand. When Babiu runs off to play, he surreptitiously retrieves it for a subsequent surprise.

We gradually feel the encroachment of the regime — most vividly when Vera and her friends are caught up in a military roadblock and knocked around. Eunice is not naïve, and she persuades Ruben to let Vera join family friends relocating — temporarily, they hope — to London. (The scene where Eunice reads Vera’s letter from England aloud to the family as they watch the spool of film she included is marvelously rich; the void of Vera’s absence filled with her witty self-expression and exuberant independence.)

You may have deduced already from a clue in the first paragraph that the dictatorship arrests a family member. Eunice is also interrogated and jailed, along with her daughter Eliana. This chain of shattering events marks a major turning point for the family and the film. From here on, Eunice must protect her children, especially the youngest ones, from fear as well as the truth.

The Paivas are a well-off family, which might have insulated them from the regime. But Ruben and Eunice have close friends whom the government perceives as sympathetic to, and perhaps participants in, the resistance. Lest we forget, suspicion, not evidence, is all that is required in a dictatorship.

I’m Still Here plays like a paranoid thriller at times, but Salles doesn’t push so far in that direction that it obscures Eunice’s daily mission of preserving the patina of normality for her kids. The everyday domestic drama gains its own power through classic (dare I say traditional) editing techniques that transparently advance the narrative and allow Eunice to ground and drive the film.

The Paiva house, situated across the street from the beach and the ocean, comes to assume the status of a character. It makes perfect sense that the childhood home would loom large in a memory piece, and calls to mind the central role of the Mexico City house in Alfonso Cuarón’s autobiographical Roma.

I’m Still Here depicts Eunice’s journey above all, and it is Fernanda Torres that lingers in the mind. She doesn’t give a florid, showy performance, but it is precise and demanding; frequently she’s required to say one thing to her children while communicating something else to the audience.

Torres’ other accomplishment is masking Eunice’s feelings, which makes I’m Still Here (Best Screenplay award at the Venice Film Festival, where it debuted before its West Coast premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October) a much more emotional experience for the viewer. Her refusal to break down in front of her children, to be an unshakeable, unbreakable wall between them and the most profound shock and sadness, creates a void that we fill.

While I maintain that I’m Still Here is more attuned to channeling Eunice’s integrity than plucking the heartstrings, it doesn’t completely avoid sentimentality. An epilogue puts a capper on Eunice’s lengthy crusade for official recognition (not the same thing as justice) of her family’s tragedy. And a final chapter — featuring Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for Salles’ much-loved Central Station (1998), as the elderly Eunice — leaves us pondering the necessity, and the impermanence, of memory.

I’m Still Here is an exemplary addition to the catalog of first-rate films about the desaparecidos of the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Brazil in the 1970s and ’80s. It is disturbing and depressing that, at this time and in this place, countless Eunices dread what’s next.