It’s 1971, and the beachfront home of the Paiva family, in Rio de Janeiro, is a hub of boisterous children, dancing adults and warm friendships presided over by Eunice Paiva and her husband, Rubens, a former congressman for the PTB, or Brazilian Labour Party.
But the country’s military junta, an unlovely alliance of martial oppression and the Catholic Church, is ever present. As the family play on the beach, a helicopter appears on the horizon. It’s the beginning of a raid on their home, triggered by suspicions that Rubens has links to Carlos Lamarca, one of the dictatorship’s highest-profile opponents.
He and then his wife are arrested, along with their daughter Eliana, one of their five children. She is released after 24 hours, Eunice after 13 days. But Rubens is never seen again.
In the wake of his disappearance, it falls to Eunice to keep the family together and keep asking questions about her husband.
According to the official account at the time, armed guerrillas freed him during an attack two days later. In fact the junta tortured and killed him: Rubens is one of more than 450 people killed or disappeared during Brazil’s two-decade dictatorship.
For Walter Salles, whose Oscar-nominated new film, I’m Still Here, is about the family, it’s a personal as well as a political story: as a teenager, the director spent many happy hours in the Paivas’ home.
“There were many things I learned from this family,” he says when we meet in Marrakesh, during the city’s film festival. “The way they exercised free speech in that house, the way that nothing was really forbidden – in fact it was the opposite. You were asked to actually be part of the conversation, which was very different from in my house, where there was a kind of a barrier between generations. I felt a sense of belonging.”
“The affection in that house was something very present. That’s why the house is like a character in the film. The first part of the film is linked to the memories I have of that space and the humanity. You would mingle with different groups and get introduced to people. Fluidity was really at the centre of that family.”
I’m Still Here is based on a book that the couple’s son Marcelo Rubens Paiva wrote a decade ago, prompted by the fact that his mother, who died in 2018, was starting to lose her memory. “She was in her 80s, and she had fought all her life to find out the truth and revive her husband’s memory. We couldn’t allow it to be forgotten,” says Salles.
“The first image of the film contains the film, as a whole, in many ways. She’s swimming in the water, but then there’s the helicopter that’s flying too low. She anticipates from that. She had the sensitivity to pick up on what was happening with the military. She understood what was going on outside the walls of the house.”
Salles came to international recognition with Central Station, a heartfelt road movie from 1998 about an unlikely bond between a bitter former schoolteacher and a young boy searching for his father.
The film won the Golden Bear at Berlin International Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign-language film. Its star Fernanda Montenegro also picked up an Oscar nomination, for best actress. With lovely neatness, Fernanda Torres, her daughter, has this year been nominated for the same award for her portrayal of Eunice Paiva.
Salles scored another global hit with The Motorcycle Diaries, from 2004, a biographical drama based on the journey of a young Che Guevara across South America, starring Gael García Bernal as the iconic rebel.
Salles has a creative freedom that not all directors enjoy: he is, after Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the world’s third-wealthiest film-maker, with, as heir to the Itaú Unibanco banking fortune, an estimated net worth of $4.5 billion.
I’m Still Here is his first feature since On the Road, his 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel.
“My friend published the book in 2015, but it took a long time to actually decant it, and you need to find the balance in the screenplay,” says Salles.
Contemporary politics provided an additional spur. In November last year Brazilian police arrested five officers for their part in an alleged coup plot to kill the country’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in 2022. That plot was part of a larger wave of right-wing action aimed at restoring the far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro to power: on January 8th, 2023, supporters stormed Brazil’s presidential palace, supreme court and congress.
“The situation today is leading so many film-makers to look at that period again – because it was back in so many ways,” says Salles. “We almost drifted again into an oppressive regime. It was only by a very little margin that it didn’t happen. That’s why so many documentaries have surfaced now about the period as well. And some are truly excellent.”
I’m Still Here won the prize for best screenplay at Venice International Film Festival last year, the first of many accolades. The film is shortlisted for three Oscars: alongside best actress, it is up for best picture and best international feature.
Fernanda Torres’s portrayal of Eunice Paiva also won her this year’s Golden Globe for best actress in a drama, beating Angelina Jolie, among others.
She was the second Brazilian to be nominated in the category. The first, again neatly, was her mother, 26 years before her. Fernanda Montenegro movingly appears as the older Eunice in the final section of I’m Still Here.
“I really consider Fernanda a co-author of the film,” says Salles. “She is somebody who has the craft but also the emotional intelligence to portray a woman that is extremely restrained. Eunice had a unique inner strength. It’s like a volcano that never spills.”
In Brazil, despite right-wing calls for a boycott, the film is a box-office sensation, taking almost $20 million against its $1.5 million production budget. Paiva’s book is back on bestseller lists. Ahead of its release in Ireland, some cinemas are reporting record bookings, with huge interest from the country’s Brazilian community.
At home, the success of I’m Still Here has reignited conversations about the military dictatorship and political trauma.
“We couldn’t talk about this,” says Salles. “In Brazil no one was punished. Nobody went in prison. Nobody said, ‘Oh my God, what a tragedy.’ A film that I loved, like Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985, was a great film and story that could not be told in Brazil.
“Because of the pandemic and because of the regime that we had, people ceased to go to the cinema to see their own reflection. The film has lent itself to this kind of collective experience. It shows how certain films need to be experienced collectively.
“In Brazil, people normally stay to the end of the credits and then they move to the front of the cinema to talk about the film. We never thought that it would generate the interest with the public it did.”
I’m Still Here is in cinemas from Friday, February 21st
