After a 12-year hiatus from fiction feature filmmaking, Brazilian director Walter Salles has been feeling the love at festivals and storming the box office at home with his moving political drama I’m Still Here.
Fernanda Torres stars as Eunice Paiva, a real-life figure whose husband Rubens Paiva, an architect and left-wing politician, disappeared in 1973, in the early years of Brazil’s military dictatorship. She is joined by Selton Mello as Rubens.
Salles has deep personal ties with the story as a friend of Paiva’s children, who frequented the family’s bohemian Rio de Janeiro beachfront home at the heart of the film, and then witnessed their struggle.
The movie premiered at Venice, where co-writers Heitor Lorega and Murilo Hauser clinched Best Screenplay, and has been on a festival tour since, winning four audience awards along the way.
The biggest prize for the Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries director Salles, however, has been the movie’s reception in Brazil, where it has taken the top slot at the box office over blockbusters Wicked and Gladiator II.
“It’s a fever now,” Salles told Deadline’s Contenders International. “The beauty of this is the fact that the cinemas are completely full with people from different generations: kids of 15, 18, 20, and then the parents of those kids and the grandparents of those kids.”
He added: “[It’s] somehow emulating what that house of the Paivas was. All generations were congregating in that house, and it pulsated with life. And strangely, the cinemas are replicating this 45 years later. Almost every single screening has been full, including on Mondays and Tuesdays. … That is an incredible gift.”
The film reunites Salles with Torres for a third time after their collaborations on Strange Land (1995) and The First Day (1998).
Torres said she was an admirer of Paiva even before Salles approached her for the role, having read the 2015 book Ainda Estou Aqui by her son Marcelo Rubens Paiva, on which the film is based.
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“Just to discover this woman, that we don’t know about because she never wanted to be known,” she ,” she told the International Contenders panel. “To discover this great Brazilian woman who resisted, who started as a housewife, a perfect housewife from the ’50s, and through a tragedy, could reinvent herself as this lawyer that defends human rights, I was in awe. … And [when] Walter invited me, it was … a gift and also a task.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
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