Growing up in Brazil around the turn of the millennium, I was too young to have lived through the violent years of the military dictatorship that last almost two decades through the mid-1980s. But my parents remember it well. In the 1970s, at the height of the regime, they were both medical students entering a public state university in Rio de Janeiro. My parents recalled seeing older people in the classroom who weren’t actual students, but undercover informants for the government. Some of their classmates were disappeared never to be seen again, while the “lucky” ones returned after days or weeks with accounts of beatings and torture.
The dictatorship wasn’t openly discussed at my mother’s home. And because of censorship of the media, her family only learned about high-profile arrests or kidnappings after the fact. “It was a Brazil of the ‘economic miracle‘ and the 1970s World Cup,” my mother said. “It was easy to ignore.” It wasn’t until she got involved with the student and organized resistance movements that she became aware of the reality of what was going on not only in Rio de Janeiro, but across the country. My mother remembered the fear of having phone calls intercepted or being followed in the streets.
I felt compelled to ask my parents, now in their 60s, about their lives under the dictatorship after seeing the Academy Award-nominated film I’m Still Here. Directed by Walter Salles (also known for Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries) and starring best actress contender Fernanda Torres, the movie is a subtle but poignant portrait of a Brazilian family caught up in the brutal military regime hat kidnapped and murdered thousands of people. It has become a box office phenomenon—reaching more than 5 million viewers in Brazil and bringing in $27.4 million internationally—and earned a spot as a frontrunner in the Oscars’ international feature film category, as well as a surprise nomination for the biggest prize of the night.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m Still Here‘s depiction of quiet resistance against creeping authoritarianism struck a chord with the Brazilian people. Only 40 years after the restoration of democracy, the largest country in South America is again grappling with the very real specter of an oppressive regime in the form of an attempted coup orchestrated by former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and military officials. At a time of encroaching anti-democratic movements both abroad and in the United States, I’m Still Here is a testament to the dignity of individual acts of resilience and a call to preserve memory and record the truth, no matter how elusive or delayed.
“The film is the product of the return of Brazil’s democracy,” Salles told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, saying that the movie, which took seven years to make, would not have been possible during the Bolsonaro years. “We shot it in 2023 without having the slightest idea that there had been a failed attempt of a military coup d’état at the end of 2022. As the film was being launched in Brazil and embraced by the audience, the news actually was unearthed by the federal police that that coup d’état that included the assassination of President Lula and of Vice-President [Geraldo] Alckmin had almost been the reality of the country.” While releasing the movie, Salles added, “We realized that more than ever it was a film about today, about what was happening in the country at this very moment.”
Based on a 2015 bestselling memoir of the same name by author Marcelo Rubens Paiva, I’m Still Here follows Eunice Paiva, a mother of five, as her affluent family’s seemingly idyllic life is turned upside down when her husband and former congressman Rubens Paiva, played by Selton Mello, is taken away by military agents. From that point forward, Eunice, an educated housewife who would later become a human rights lawyer and activist, is forced to reinvent herself to preserve her family, while relentlessly fighting to keep her husband’s disappearance at the hands of the military junta from being forgotten.
It took 25 years for the Brazilian state to so much as acknowledge Rubens Paiva’s death. In one of the most moving scenes in I’m Still Here, Eunice talks to reporters as she finally obtains official proof of her husband’s passing. “It’s odd, you know, to feel relief with a death certificate,” she says. “Forced disappearances were one of the cruelest acts of the regime because you kill one person but condemn all the others to eternal psychological torture.”
The body of Rubens Paiva was never found. The five military officers charged with torturing and killing him benefited from a 1979 amnesty law and were never brought to justice. But I’m Still Here has had an impact, leading Brazilians to protest outside the houses of perpetrators of dictatorship-era crimes. It has also led to revisions to death certificates, including that of Rubens Paiva, to characterize the cause of death as “unnatural, violent, caused by the Brazilian state.” And this month, Brazil’s Supreme Court decided to revisit whether to revoke amnesty for the officers involved in the cases of Paiva and two other opponents of the regime.
I’m Still Here aptly captures a feeling that, at least on the surface, daily life carried on as usual during the years of the dictatorship. At first, Rubens Paiva downplays the looming perils, reassuring a publisher friend fleeing to London that “it won’t be long” before things normalize. But from the first scenes, Salles’ movie also establishes the insidious presence of the repressive state. Early in the film, one of the Paiva’s daughters is left shaken after being stopped and interrogated during a traffic blitz; in another scene, Eunice watches military trucks parading the streets of Leblon while the happy family snaps photos with friends on the beach. In showing us these mundane moments, I’m Still Here renders the sudden but permanent violence that afflicts the Paivas all the more jarring and chilling. Later in the movie, Eunice and one of her teenage daughters are arrested and taken to a military facility inside the army headquarters to be interrogated. The building, where dozens were tortured and killed, has been at the center of a dispute over turning it into a historical landmark.
Many Brazilian movies over the years have helped memorialize these events, including The Year My Parents Went on Vacation and Four Days in September, which also stars Torres and Mello and has Alan Arkin in the role of a kidnapped American ambassador. But I’m Still Here, perhaps through the sheer force of prescient timing and a great award-season campaign by Torres and Salles, has taken on a life of its own. In the process of captivating audiences worldwide and bringing renewed attention to Brazil’s rich filmmaking tradition, it has propelled an entire country to look at an open wound. As my mother put it: “It helps to realize that this is a real threat.”
I can’t imagine I’m the only person my age having these conversations with their parents in Brazil or who has found in the movie a new window into the atrocities committed at that time. But I’m Still Here is more than an exercise in remembering some of the darkest chapters in our country’s past. In light of January 8, 2023, when Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil’s capital in a January 6-like insurrection; the ongoing revelations about how close we came to history repeating itself; and continued efforts to rewrite this painful history, the movie transcends its historical context. With or without an Oscar nod, I’m Still Here invites a reckoning with the present and offers a warning for the future.
