There is a unique, devastating power in Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here. It does not merely recount history; it resurrects it, forces us to sit with it, and refuses to let us turn away. Based on the memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the film offers an intimate portrayal of a family torn apart by the Brazilian military dictatorship—yet it transcends personal tragedy to confront a nation’s struggle with memory itself. This is not just a story of forced disappearance, but of the insistence to remember when forgetting would be far easier.
Selton Mello plays Rubens Paiva, the former congressman whose opposition to the dictatorship sealed his fate. Yet Salles, in a masterstroke, does not position Rubens as the emotional anchor of the film. That distinction belongs to Eunice, his wife, played with quiet ferocity by Fernanda Torres. The opening sequence finds her floating in the ocean near their Ipanema home, momentarily suspended in peace before the weight of the world drags her back to shore. In this moment, we meet a woman who finds refuge in transience, in the illusion of control over her own body, even as the tides—and soon the military—pull her life in directions she cannot dictate.
The Paiva home, with its sunlit corridors and lively dinner table debates, is a place of warmth, a bastion of intellect and art. Theirs is a family that celebrates the work of Gilberto Gil, discusses Antonioni over shared cigars, and clings to the remnants of a cultural revolution already being snuffed out. When government officials—dressed in civilian clothes, their presence an unspoken but suffocating threat—arrive at their doorstep, the invasion is deceptively polite. Rubens is asked to come along for questioning. He reassures his wife and children that he will return soon. He never does.
From this moment, I’m Still Here becomes Eunice’s story. Where so many films about political persecution dwell in suffering, Salles focuses instead on resilience. Eunice shields her children from the immediate horror of their father’s disappearance, even as the walls of their home seem to close in. At dinner, she maintains the routine. At night, she watches her children sleep, knowing she cannot promise them safety. It is in these restrained moments that Torres delivers a performance for the ages—there is no wailing, no melodramatic descent into despair, only the measured resolve of a mother who understands that grief is a luxury she cannot afford.
Eunice’s defiance, however, is not silent. When she and her teenage daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) are detained for questioning, she refuses to bow. She knows the state would like nothing more than for her to break, to give in to the uncertainty, to become a cautionary tale. Instead, she fights. She launches a public campaign for answers, knowing full well that justice, in the legal sense, will never come. The dictatorship thrives on gaslighting its citizens, on rewriting history in real time. But Eunice will not let them erase Rubens. If the government controls the official narrative, then she will write the unofficial one—through press, through protest, through the sheer force of her will.
Salles captures this battle with a meticulous eye for detail. There is a stark contrast between the sun-drenched freedom of the Paiva family’s past and the claustrophobic present, where even the family home feels like a surveillance site. The film spans decades, and in its later moments, we see the cost of Eunice’s endurance. By the time we meet her in 2014, she is frail, battling Alzheimer’s, her memories slipping from her grasp. And yet, the essence of her remains. In a family photograph, she smiles—proof that even when history tries to erase, to diminish, something of us always stays behind.
I’m Still Here is not a history lesson, nor is it merely a biopic. It is a reckoning. The film echoes the words of historian Emília Viotti da Costa: “A people without memory is a people without history.” In a country where those who once championed dictatorship now march freely in the streets, Salles’ film insists on remembering. It is an elegy, a protest, and above all, a warning.
4.5/5
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