Film Notes

I’m Still Here review – wrenching true-life saga of a Brazilian family torn apart by military rule.

When a former congressman is abducted from his beachfront home in 1970s Rio, his wife and children are left reeling – for decades – in Walter Salles’s Oscar-nominated drama starring an extraordinary Fernanda Torres.

Sometimes, the course of a life changes suddenly and emphatically with an event so final and unequivocal that it shifts the very world on its axis. On other occasions that change, or at least the understanding of that change, comes gradually, with the enormity of the situation obscured by the natural human propensity to hope for a happy outcome. For Eunice Paiva – the phenomenal Fernanda Torres – in Brazilian director Walter Salles’s superb, factually based Portuguese-language drama I’m Still Here, both are true.

When we first meet Eunice, life with her husband, Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman and civil engineer, and their five children in a beachfront house in 1970 Rio de Janeiro, is full of friends and laughter; books and art; cigars, whisky and celebration. The flexing muscle of Brazil’s military dictatorship is background noise – the helicopter blades carving up the sky as the kids play beach volleyball; the rumble of a convoy of armoured vehicles on the seafront – that can be tuned out. It feels removed from the liberal intellectual social whirl of the Paiva household.

Then one afternoon, men with guns and sour faces arrive at the door. They’ve come, they say, to take Rubens to make a statement. Who they are and where he has been removed to remain a mystery. Eunice and her 15-year-old daughter, Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), are also questioned. Eliana, although Eunice doesn’t know it, is released after 24 hours. Eunice, meanwhile, is kept in a filthy cell and subjected to repeated interrogations over 12 days. It’s the kind of trauma that scars a person’s psyche, but Eunice, for the sake of her kids and her own sanity, puts on a brave face and one of her many immaculately chic trouser suits and campaigns for Rubens’ safe return.

The first and longest chapter of this involving saga observes an unwittingly sheltered woman slowly coming to terms with the fact that the world has changed for ever, and so must she. The realisation that her husband is gone for good is a gradual process that plays out, largely without words, on Torres’s face, in a performance of extraordinary intelligence and emotional complexity. She is deservedly Oscar-nominated for best actress. I’m Still Here is also in contention for best picture and best international feature film, and following the Emilia Pérez debacle it’s the one to beat in this last category.

His first Brazil-set feature since Linha de Passe in 2008, it’s a personal project for Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries; Central Station). As a child in Rio, he was close friends with the Paiva children – part of the constant tide of visitors who flowed through the always-open doors of the airy, friendly house on the beach. I’m Still Here is based on a memoir by Eunice’s son Marcelo Rubens Paiva, who co-wrote the screenplay with Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega; the considerable Paiva archive of photos and home videos was an invaluable resource. In this film about the resilience of family, there’s also a personal connection for lead actor Torres: her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, nominated 26 years ago for an Oscar for her performance in Central Station, appears in this film in a brief but devastating coda, playing Eunice as an older woman.

Meticulous in its period detail, I’m Still Here unfolds in a vividly evoked early 1970s Rio, with two later chapters set in 1996 and 2014. Far-reaching in its themes, the picture represents Salles at his absolute best. It looks sublime: the director chose to shoot on various film stocks, with grainy, skittish Super-16 capturing the energy and excitement of being a teenager running riot on the streets of Rio, and 35mm bringing a pleasing, lived-in texture to the domestic scenes. A terrific soundtrack balances the irreverent energy of Brazilian Tropicália artists such as Tom Zé and Caetano Veloso against a pensive, brooding score by Warren Ellis.

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Among the film’s many exquisitely realised scenes, several stand out. One comes immediately after Eunice has heard from an associate of her husband the unconfirmed rumour of Rubens’ death. She has promised to take the children for ice-cream and that’s what she does, wrapping them in a protective layer of normalcy. But she scans the room in anguish, each laughing family sharing sundaes a choking reminder of the small, shared marital joys stolen from her.

Another is when Eunice decides to relocate the family to São Paulo to go back to college (in real life, she went on to become a human rights lawyer). As the last of their possessions are loaded into the car, the youngest of the Paiva children, Babiu (Cora Mora), sits on the doorstep, her face a mask of grief, leaning towards the now empty rooms as though drawn by the magnetic pull of happier times. It’s in this moment, we later learn, that the Babiu “buried” her father, realising then that he wasn’t coming home. I have watched I’m Still Here three times, and this achingly sad single shot has broken me every time.

Wendy Ide, The Guardian, 23rd Feb 2025

I’m Still Here: Fernanda Torres shines in Walter Salles’ Brazilian family saga

By retelling the real-life story of activist Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), whose husband was abducted by Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1971, director Walter Salles is speaking of and to the nation once again.

A swimmer floats on her back off Copacabana Beach as a helicopter flies above. She is Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), whose five children are playing beach volleyball while a stray dog keeps interfering. The family’s blissful life of affection and closeness is signalled by the children’s adoption of the dog, agreed to by their easy-going, burly engineer father Rubens (Selton Mello), the figure on whom, at first, the film centres. 

Meals with adult friends and the children’s sing-alongs equally carry weight in these early scenes because the film, adapted from a memoir by one of the children, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, also draws on director Walter Salles’s personal memories of this real-life family. He spent time with the Paivas during his adolescence, in the early 1970s, envying their intimacy and openness. Love and duty are woven into the film’s fabric. 

The Paivas live in a gorgeous rented house next to the beach. Fabulous Brazilian music – Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa – helps evoke a sense of 60s and 70s youth culture. There’s a resemblance, too, to the sprawling Mexico City family life depicted in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), set in the same year, 1970.

In contrast to Roma’s monochrome, however, I’m Still Here had me thinking of Paul Simon’s 1973 song ‘Kodachrome’: “They give us the nice bright colours / They give us the greens of summers.” The teenage eldest daughter Vera (Valentina Herszage) wields a Super 8 camera, and the grain and hues of 35mm film enhance that period feel, courtesy of cinematographer Adrian Teijido. It is Vera who has the family’s first encounter with Brazil’s military government, when she and her friends are treated roughly at a roadblock; but she is otherwise fortunate to be sent away to study in London before the beautifully established familial Eden is brought to a close. 

Anonymous, thuggish men come to the house, telling Eunice they’re waiting for her husband. They post themselves about the shared rooms, giving nothing away, while family life proceeds around them – Eunice even offers them food. When Rubens comes home, he is soon driven away to “give a deposition”. We are given no indication of what he’s done to deserve this. 

Days pass before Eunice herself is ordered into a car alongside 15-year-old Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), the second oldest child, and black hoods are put over their heads. Locked in a cell, Eunice listens to the screams of the tortured and hopes for snatches of information. She’s made to examine books of mugshots, her husband and daughter among them. After 12 days she is released back home and is relieved to find Eliana there too. 

Given no information regarding Rubens’s fate, with the discovery that she has no access to his funds, Eunice is forced to move the family out. She takes a law degree at the age of 48. The first of two jumps forward in time takes us to 1998. Eunice has become a powerhouse activist at the centre of the campaign to find out what happened to the hundreds of desaparecidos (disappeared) like her husband. Fernanda Torres’s restrained portrayal of this resilient matriarch, who retains her dignity even in the most terrifying moments, is one of total conviction (and won her a Best Actress Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination).

The second time-leap, to 2014, sees Torres replaced in the role by her real-life mother Fernanda Montenegro, the revered star of Salles’s breakthrough feature Central Station (1998). With Eunice now in a wheelchair and living from dementia, the family prepares one more signature meal. By this point you may feel that Salles is letting the saga drift, but that’s a consequence of his sense of duty to a story that has wider ramifications. 

Thinking about Central Station sent me back to an interview I did with Salles when it was released. He talked about a “culture of cynicism and indifference” that prevailed in the Brazil of the 1960s and 1970s and said that he prefers to make films “fundamentally related to me”. The Paivas are emblematic of resistance to that cynicism. In Central Station he got to the rural heart of what his huge, near ungovernable nation was all about. Here, in Brazil’s post-Bolsonaro moment, he’s speaking of and to the nation again. 

Biopics are rarely to my taste but the power of this film overcame my prejudice. Perhaps ignorance of Eunice’s story – already well-known in Brazil – helped dispel any sense of the pre-ordained. But in any case, given Torres’s brilliant, understated performance and Salles’s deep understanding of what he’s trying to achieve, the film would stand as a shining, thoroughly convincing exception.

Nick James, Sight & Sound, 19 February 2025.

What you thought about I'm Still Here

Film Responses

Collated Response Comments

115 members and guests attended this screening. We received 72 responses giving a film score of 4.83 and a response rate of 63%. Thank you so much for taking the time to tell us how you felt about the film. it is much appreciated. All of your comments are collected below.

“I thought last night’s film was excellent. My attention was totally gripped throughout. The horror of the main character’s detention was conveyed with tension and nuance without the need for graphic scenes of torture”.

“Shocking. Wonderfully colourful carefree, to dystopian drab anxiety-laden painful coda. A masterpiece. Also shocking I hadn't remembered that Brazil, like other South American countries had a military dictatorship with the "disappeared " Brilliant. Cd write a whole essay!!”

“I was braced for 'worthy' and was wooed by something that felt true. There are accusations of sentimentality in reviews due to the director's relationship with the family but it is the depth and detail (often unexplained - Marcelo's injury?) that creates the seductive patina of real life. The layering of textures; the music, the grainy super 8 footage, overlapping conversations and frankly unnecessary diversions that most editors would have excised, builds a believable family so that the blow, when it comes, as you know it must, is that much more heartbreaking. Where the film might have dragged, your investment in all the family members keeps you glued to the narrative. Fernanda Torres produces a superbly three-dimensional portrayal of Eunice. The film could hardly be more relevant in the days of ICE in the land of the supposedly free. Excellent”.

“Thank you for showing this stunning film, my favourite to date over all the seasons. Wonderful acting, cinematography and the heart-breaking portrayal of the lightness and humanity of a normal loving and gentle family against the brutality and darkness of the military dictatorship at the time. It left a big impact with me long after the credits rolled”.

“I'm Still Here was a phenomenal film, particularly in its portrayal of the heroine as a mother and the strength of the lead actress's performance. The subtle use of motifs and symbols--such as the dog, photographs, and water--was effective, but it was the story itself that was most touching. Thank you!”

“Such an emotional roller coaster. Fernanda Torres is a tour de force as the amazing Eunice Paiva. A woman trying to keep her 5 children safe and secure when her husband is taken”.

“A moving story. She fought for years to get info. Very sad her health at the end”.

“A very powerful film that was almost unbearable to watch at first - beautiful scene of a movie wonderfully happy and free-spirited family suddenly confronted and severely affected by the military dictatorship that was in power at that time. Also, a reminder in the current climate of how fragile our democracy and freedoms are still”.

“Brilliant film, the best of the current season and one of the best I remember seeing at GFS. The review by Wendy Ide posted on the website sums it up perfectly - I couldn't do better! A great choice and the total silence at the end and through the credits said it all. Thanks”.

“Though not a feelgood movie, this has an important story to tell, particularly to those of us who have never had the experience of living under a brutal military regime. Somehow, love and resilience overcome cruelty and terror. For me, the final sadness was the family meal in 2014, at which we discover that our heroine suffered from dementia towards the end of her life, thus depriving her and the family of much pleasure in life and each other that they surely deserved”.

“A very powerful film. Beautifully filmed evocation of family life in 70s Rio. Shocking and moving how life can change so abruptly. Wonderful performances, particularly lead actress. Thank you for choosing this excellent film”.

“The Film Director artfully draws you into the film about the emotional turmoil of the Paiva family caught up in the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1970s. I admired Eunice Paiva's strength of character and resilience to move forward with their children to rebuild their lives. I admired the cohesion of the family bond during a crisis. From this tragic scenario Eunice became a recognized activist in the world. It exemplifies we need journalism to bring change for a better life in this world, a voice for the people”.

“A fantastic film. Poignant without being overly sensational. Brilliantly acted and completely engrossing. I was very moved by this depiction of a real-life event”.

“This was one of my favourite films this year! The filming was just incredible. The main actress was brilliant. It really evoked the feeling of the 70's. The old cars, the cinefilming etc. It did not show the violence but by not doing this it was more powerful. Loved it from start to finish”.

“Unbelievably true! What an account. Let’s not complain about trivia”.

“Lovely pace to this film – leading you into the story. Excellent acting by lead actress”.

“Outstanding lead performance. Very moving. Best film of the year”.

“An intensely moving and important informative film”.

“Incredible film, I was totally hooked”.

“Frightening and heartbreakingly sad but also uplifting. An example of resilience and a film that will stay with me for a long time”.

“Brilliant”.      “Outstanding. Thank you”.   “Superb”.

“Very powerful and moving tribute to the spirit of the best of humanity – love and family and resistance”.

“Harrowing yet very emotive – an excellent film”.

“Excellent film – so very glad we came to see it”.

“Outstanding”.   “Really well acted”.     “Very powerful”.

“Thank you Godalming film society for providing such an amazing movie. One of the best”.

“A beautiful, moving film about a tragic event. Very well done”.

“Extraordinarily powerful account – the acting was exceptional -one could hardly believe they were not the real family. Devastating times! Brilliant musical score”.

“Incredible film on a subject I know not much about. So informative, so brilliantly acted”.

“Unbearably powerful and well done”.

“Wow! So powerful and what a leading actress”.

“Powerful and gripping throughout. Fantastic to look at and made with love and rage”.

“The disappeared – the reality and impact – so much more than a documentary – well filmed and acted”.

“An amazing story and to think no one were given any prison sentences. The family has kept their father’s life in the picture with this wonderful book”.

“Powerful story. Very moving”.     “Absolutely compelling”      “Too long”.

“A frightening story – well told and well acted”.

“Good but too long”.

“Excellent but rather condensed – so much time spent on idyllic life before the event and rather sped by towards the end”.

“Very educational and sad. Not sure the 2014 part added anything except the new section to fill in more history. Would have liked more on her transition and study to be a lawyer”.

“Very sad but ultimately uplifting”.

“A little too long”.

“Fascinating story. Great filming. Great acting. Sad ending”.

“Very good but longer than it needed to be”.