I’m Still Here (2024)

A family's ordeal under a brutal Brazilian dictatorship is given vibrant life

I’m Still Here (2024)

In theaters

There’s an astounding scene in Sounder (1972, dir. Martin Ritt) when Cicely Tyson as Rebecca, wife of a Black sharecropper in 1930s Louisiana, runs toward her husband Nathan (Paul Winfield). He’s returning from serving time in a hard labor camp for the crime of stealing food to feed his family.

The couple’s poignant reuniting, with Tyson’s cry as she races downhill toward Nathan, her arms spread wide to embrace him, has entered into movie legend. Tyson won a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her wrenching performance, and the power of that moment surely helped make up the Academy’s mind.

With Nathan imprisoned, Rebecca and her children had to keep working the family’s small parcel of land to stay alive. Her dogged strength from decades ago surged back to me as I watched I’m Still Here, based on a true story.

In the Rio de Janeiro of 1971, an oddly similar struggle to survive suddenly falls to a mother. Eunice Pavia (Fernanda Torres) is blissfully married to Rubens Pavia (Selton Mello), a former Brazilian congressman who’s now a successful construction engineer.

Their rambling two-story house rings with laughter from their son and four daughters. Friends and relatives regularly join in celebrations of holidays and birthdays, snapping photos, swaying to lilting Brazilian music, with life swirling along as merrily as the 45-r.p.m. records they keep spinning.

On screen we’ve been told that Brazil is being ruled by a military dictatorship, but its ominous presence seems slightly removed from Rubens’ happy family. He’s a jovial, apparently trouble-free husband and father who breezily frolics with his children and still teasingly flirts with his wife.

Eunice is taken by surprise when four stern men appear at the door demanding to see Rubens. He doesn’t hesitate to speak to them, but we sense he knows that these armed men mean trouble. To keep his family unworried, he smiles just before one of them orders him into his car and drives off with him for “questioning”.

The three other men stay in the house, close the blinds and order Eunice, if she answers the telephone, to tell callers Rubens has suddenly had to travel. She asks them to holster their weapons, so as not to frighten her children. Trying to stay calm, she can’t hide the furrows in her brow.

Fernanda Torres gives a subdued, nuanced portrait of Eunice, a woman forced to dig deeply into her inner resources to keep her sanity. Her acting is sublimely subtle. Her liveliness as a cheerful wife and mother is kept under a wise control, as if Eunice knows somehow senses she may be called on to make unimaginable sacrifices.

The family’s nightmare has begun. The next day Eunice and daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) are arrested, hooded and hauled off to prison. Eliana can tell the military junta’s grim enforcers little, so she’s soon released.

Not Eunice. She’s put in solitary confinement for 12 days, grilled about her husband’s activities, threatened if she refuses to name his co-conspirators against the junta.

She can’t because she doesn’t know that Rubens and other professionals have been quietly helping dissidents. Which is why her husband’s fate has been cast to the political winds.

Director Walter Salles, working from a screenplay by Milo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, makes a double-barreled run on this family political drama. Warmth and chill judder against one another.

Cinematographer Adrian Teijido shoots in a rich documentary style, picturing the family's buoyant home life, just across from a billowy beach, as a becalmed idyll, more of a refuge than they realize.

From 1965 to 1984 Brazil was under military rule, and more than 20,000 were tortured, murdered or “disappeared”. We’re caught off guard at first, as we see a brightly colored household swiftly undermined by brute police power.

Actual archived home movie footage shot by daughter Veroca (played by Valentina Herszage) is interwoven with scenes of a bewildered Eunice, once released, trying to keep her children safe and pressing friends and government officials to learn Rubens’ whereabouts.

That becomes a years-long struggle. No word of him comes. Out of options, and running out of money, Eunice and her children have to sell their beloved home and move to São Paulo, where they can start life again. Eunice earns a law degree and becomes an activist on behalf of the resistance.

As her children age and grow into adulthood, we see Eunice continue to challenge the authorities, determined to learn what happened to Rubens.

Happier days: Rubens, Eunice (top right), family and friends in a still hopeful Brazil

She never sees him again, yet she tells a group of gathered reporters that it’s a peculiar kind of joy to finally be handed Rubens’ official death certificate, insisting that the wretched truth is better than years of not knowing.

For Eunice there’s no run down a hillside to embrace her husband, no reunion for him with his children and grandchildren. But like Rebecca in the Depression-era U.S., Eunice in her husband’s absence has kept the family he loved flourishing, and that’s a triumph over oppression that only survivors can fully understand.

Fernanda Torres gives a subdued, nuanced portrait of Eunice, a woman forced to dig deeply into her inner resources to keep her sanity. Her acting is sublimely subtle. Her liveliness as a cheerful wife and mother is kept under a wise control, as if to signal to us that Eunice may be called on to make unimaginable sacrifices.

As the years wear on, and her commitment to exposing Brazil’s cruel regime hardens to a glistening defiance, the actress’ moves become delicately trimmer, her arms held closer to her body. Her eyes filled with sadness roam less, rest more in rueful contemplation.

This year Torres, like Tyson in 1973, is Oscar-nominated for Best Actress. The Academy shamefully overlooked the galvanic Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s towering performance in Hard Truths.

Her work and Torres’ are the two best lead female performances I saw in 2024 releases. A win for Torres would put a bright capstone on the cinema year.

The movie is nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and that selection justly honors Salles’ achievement.

Rubens Pavia’s body has never been found. But his loss and legacy burn bright in this mesmerizing validation of a life cut short.

With authoritarianism today blossoming in latitudes across the globe, here’s a movie that doesn’t just show us past injustices. It can wake us up to an endangered present. Salles and his collaborators are sounding an alarm if we can bend our ears to hear it.