I'm Still Here
Ainda Estou Aqui

Brazilian director Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries, On the Road) helms this powerful story of a family living under military dictatorship in 1970s Rio de Janeiro. Fernanda Torres plays Eunice Paiva, the matriarch of the Paiva family who is left somewhat powerless when her husband, former Labor Party congressman Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), is taken in for questioning by the army, never to return. Eunice and her five children attempt to weather the storm that has been gathering for so long in their country it has almost become second nature. That slow normalization of armed police checkpoints, circling helicopters, and insane TV news is the frighteningly timely aspect of this movie. What happens to this happy, normal, middle-class family is the kind of scenario people used to think would never happen in America, but now seems far more plausible.

Torres has been nominated for the Best Actress Oscar in one of the year's only surprise upsets. It's a deserving pick, as she carries this movie with impressive reserve. This is an internalized performance of rage held in check as Eunice places raising her children as priority number one while, at the same time, she works towards obtaining government accountability for her husband's "disappearance." At first she does this in secret and then, after much sacrifice, in a more public-facing way. Because there are so many kids and the film takes place over so many decades, not everyone in the family can be developed into a fully fleshed-out character. What comes across instead is a compelling and utterly convincing portrait of a family, thanks, in no small part, to the excellent casting. The movie is based on the memoir of Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Eunice and Rubens' only son, but the film centers on his heroic mother (played at the end by Fernanda Montenegro, Torres' actual mother and the star of Salles's breakout film Central Station). I have no idea how much of the book this movie covers or which of the real-life individuals the memoir's title refers to.

Watching I'm Still Here, I couldn't help but compare it to other recent films that tell similar stories more compellingly, like Quo Vadis, Aida? and Argentina, 1985. Still, this is a unique take on what is traditionally a far more intense and emotionally harrowing narrative. There is something removed and intellectual about this picture, which, again, makes it feel oddly timely. Normally, when watching a story from the past about people in a wartorn or occupied nation that feels like it could be happening right now in your own country, you feel all the more viscerally connected to it. But we're living in 2025 America. Most of us have made some kind of emotional disconnect from what's happening in our "democracy" so that we can go on with our lives... until we're directly affected ourselves.