In I’m Still Here (Ainda estou aqui), Walter Salles takes the true story of the arrest and disappearance of Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) and creates a potent narrative about courage, resilience, tenacity, and family. Salles focuses on Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) and her search for her husband; a search which, in time, uncovers the truth about the Brazilian military dictatorship’s use of torture, extrajudicial kidnappings, and ‘disappearances.’
The Paiva family is educated, free spirited, urbane, and adoring. The eldest, Vera (Valentina Herszage), is about to head to university but her parents recognise she will likely get involved in student activism, putting her at risk. An early scene in the film with Vera driving home with her friends, smoking joints, and singing pop songs turns suddenly chilling as they are stopped by the military police, narrowly avoiding detention.
What begins as a breezy September in Rio in 1970 with most of the family spending their days on the beach across the street from their chic home, becomes more fraught as the Brazilian Liberation Alliance increase their radical anti-regime activities. Family friends plan to leave Brazil for London as their printing press is forced to shut down. They offer to take Vera with them.
Eunice’s other children: Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), Nalu (Barbara Luz), Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira), and Babiu (Cora Mora) live mostly in a haze of the love their parents have for them, and for each other. Life is spent traipsing sand, water, and stray dogs into their comfortable home. Rubens is a good-natured man and excellent father who indulges them. Eunice is excited by the new house Rubens has designed and will be building for the family. The shadow of the dictatorship has caught Rubens before when he was a government official when his party was ousted via a coup ‘d’état in 1964. Nevertheless, life appears mostly stable as Rubens now works as an engineer. The family is happy - and with Vera safely in London sending them 8mm films of her adventures there - the sunshine, music, and warmth in their home provides a sense of shelter. Until it is suddenly shattered.
On January 21st, 1971, Rubens is taken away by unknown armed men to “answer questions.” For days others stay in the home ensuring Eunice and the children do not leave or contact anyone. Each time Eunice asks when Rubens will return or where the deposition is, the men say they cannot answer her. Eunice does her best with the housekeeper Zezé to remain calm for the younger children. Eunice is terrified, and when she and Eliana are taken to the Centro de Operações de Defesa Interna (DOI CODI) and subjected to psychological torture the extent of the dictatorship’s complete power over her family is understood. Eunice endures twelve days of sleep deprivation, interrogation, and physical abuse.
Eunice arrives home after her arbitrary release, scrubs the trauma off in the shower, and is transformed. “Mother takes care of this now,” is her vow to her traumatised children. The family is placed in a limbo with the dictatorship refusing to accommodate any request for information about Rubens – his previous position as a congressman means the dictatorship want it to appear that he is alive, but elsewhere. Eunice becomes an investigator, a sole parent, and a protector: holding herself with self-possession, quiet fury, and all-encompassing love for her children.
Fernanda Torres is extraordinary as Eunice, and Salles directs her with an attentiveness that hones in on her internal emotional state as well as her externalised intelligence and dignity. Eunice refuses to let people forget about Rubens despite the dictatorship ensuring their story remains untold. Every refusal is an act of rebellion. The refusal to let Babiu loose the magical memories of Rubens burying her baby tooth in the sand. The refusal to ignore the everyday ‘normality’ she curates for her children.
I’m Still Here is a testament to life. Vera, Eliana, Nalu, Marcelo, and Babiu are each vivid both in their joy, fragility, and pain. The teenage temperaments of the older daughters who love the Brazil created by Rubens and Eunice; humorous, romantic, and encouraging. When Rubens is gone, and their lives go through a slow attrition and long grief, they don’t stop in place. Marcelo and Babiu find it more difficult to comprehend, but Eunice’s rebuilding of herself is in service to their futures and maintaining their faith in togetherness.
I’m Still Here features two time shifts. One in Sao Paolo where they relocated so Eunice could get a law degree. It’s 1996 and Eunice is an international lawyer and activist for Indigenous land rights. Marcelo (Antonio Saboia) is a respected author, and Babiu (Olivia Torres) has a settled adult life. The two, who are one year apart in age, discuss when they ‘buried’ their father. A lingering shot on the Rio house and child Babiu’s reaction to its emptiness is evoked when she answers it was that day.
In the second time shift it is 2014 and Fernanda Torres’ mother Fernanda Montenegro plays the elderly Eunice. Generations come together, and their Brazil is reconfigured.
Salles and cinematographer Adrian Teijido fashion a memory box by switching visual stock. Vera’s Super8 camera documents why Rubens resisted, why Eunice persisted, and reminds one these moments and people existed. Capturing Brazil’s repressive era of dictatorial terror through the lens of one family doesn’t skirt around the loss and scars imprinted on the country, nor does it lessen the wider societal scope.
I’m Still Here is adapted by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega directly from the memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva and it is unmistakable that Eunice’s influence and example planted powerful seeds. The people who fought, mourned, smiled in photographs taken memorialising a perfect day, and those where happiness was an act of defiance. From gentle currents buoying Eunice as she floats to entering the same water to scream where she cannot be heard.
I’m Still Here is testimony: not only of a remarkable woman whose spirit was indomitable but also of the family whose love never faltered in darkness.
Director: Walter Salles
Cast: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Valentina Herszage
Writers: Murilo Hauser, Heitor Lorega, (Based on the book by Marcelo Rubens Paiva)
Producers: Maria Carlota Bruno, Martine de Clermont-Tonnerre, Rodrigo Teixeira
Music: Warren Ellis
Cinematography: Adiran Teijido
Editor: Affonso Gonçalves
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