I’M STILL HERE

Watch The Trailer

Storyline (warning: spoilers)

Emotions hide beneath the surface and horrors lurk behind unseen doors in Walter Salles’s Oscar-nominated tale of the Brazilian disappeared. Based on the true story of Reuben Paiva, I’m Still Here takes a political and human rights story and imbues it with the very human themes of family, grief, survival and, above all, hope in the face of debilitating tragedy.
The subtlety and dignity of Fernanda Torres’s Oscar-nominated performance in Walter Salles’s new film have been rightly praised. This is a kind of mother-courage true story: the case of Eunice Paiva, a Brazilian woman who had to keep her family together and shield her five children from despair when her activist husband Rubens was brutally “disappeared” in 1971 by the military dictatorship. They refused even to admit he had been arrested, or later officially admit his death, in a state-sanctioned act of cruelty which was only finally acknowledged in the mid-90s after decades of campaigning, when the government issued a formal death certificate.
I’m Still Here is a drama which intelligently seeks to intuit the courageously maintained calm that Eunice imposes on herself and the children when the thuggish secret police arrive. Torres is effectively the still centre of a heartfelt but also somehow numbed and sometimes even strangely placid story. The film shows Eunice’s instinctive sense that overt outrage would be interpreted as leftist defiance and guilt. But it also shows her in some sense going into denial, rejecting the horror which is too much to process. She appears to be wordlessly telling everyone: just stay level, try to fabricate some normality at home, and soon it will all be over, and Rubens will return.
The film premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded Best Screenplay, and was selected as Brazil’s entry for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Oscars.