With perfect Oscars timing - it's deservedly up for Best Picture, Best International Feature, and Best Actress - I'm Still Here arrives in cinemas a week after another must-see true story, the Munich massacre docudrama September 5.
I'm Still Here also chronicles harrowing real-life events in the 1970s, this time focusing on civil engineer and former politician Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres), and their five children during Brazil's military dictatorship. It's based on the memoir of the same name by the couple's son, the author Marcelo Rubens Paiva.
Their family life was shattered when Rubens was taken from his home one afternoon in January 1971, supposedly to give a deposition. Eunice was told her husband would be back "soon". He never returned. In the months and years that followed, Eunice held the family together while searching for answers. She became a human rights lawyer and activist. Rubens' remains have never been found.
For director Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries), this film is more than a passion project: he knew the Paiva family and grew up with the children. "Their house," Salles says, "remains etched in my memory".
As it will yours. Anchored by a superb central performance by Torres, this is a film that sees the love and safety of the ties that bind tested by trauma and terror. It's a warning from history created when, as Salles puts it, "life in Brazil veered dangerously close to that past". It's also a reminder to us all that home is the people; the rest is just bricks and mortar.
For a film that's over two hours long, I'm Still Here is remarkably pacy. Like fellow Oscar nominee The Brutalist, it rushes things a little when it moves the decades forward for the epilogue, but that is the only shortcoming. The closing scene is one of the most powerful that you'll see - Torres' mother and fellow actor Fernanda Montenegro playing Eunice Paiva in her 80s.
In January, Reuters reported that Rubens Paiva's death certificate had been amended to register that the cause of his death was "unnatural, violent, caused by the Brazilian State in the context of systematic persecution of the population identified as political dissidents of the dictatorial regime established in 1964".
Salles, his cast, and crew have done justice to the Paiva family's story. You need to do the same.
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