I’m Still Here, nominated for three Academy Awards including Best Picture, tells a true story from Brazil’s years of military dictatorship. But you don’t have to know anything about Brazilian history or politics to be blown away by the movie.
The film’s depiction of the tight-knit Paiva family while they are forced to cope with the 1971 disappearance of their father (Rubens, a former congressman) provides the film’s emotional heart. Meanwhile, Fernanda Torres’ warm, nuanced, and resolute performance as Eunice, her family’s “mother bear,” gives the film a steely narrative backbone.
Still, for Brazilians, who have flocked to the movie in droves, it is also a cry of the heart for the still unacknowledged victims of a military dictatorship that held power from 1964 to 1985. As such, it’s a cry the rest of the world should hear and heed.
Tolstoy famously said all happy families are alike, and the Paivas serve to prove his point. For anyone who’s had the good fortune to be part of a happy family, the joyous shared rituals and pastimes—dancing together, playing foosball, eating Mom’s souffles—will push deep emotional buttons even before the shadow of tragedy encroaches.
The five Paiva children range in age from elementary school to late teens, and amid the usual day-to-day squabbles, they look out for one another in ways that are truly touching.
The family needs that reservoir of nurturance and goodwill when plainclothesmen with guns arrive to take Rubens away for “questioning.” He never returns. The government men stay in the family home for several days; they watch from a parked car for even longer.
Eventually, Eunice and a teenage daughter are also taken in. This gets us inside one of the government’s secret prisons, where they hose the blood out of the hallways and the screams of torture victims echo at all hours. When Eunice is released, she moves the family closer to her parents’ home, goes back to school in her 40s, and begins to move on with her post-Rubens life.
Memory is one of the film’s persistent themes. The Paiva family are constantly taking photos of themselves to commemorate family events. In their predigital world, these end up in cardboard boxes that Eunice keeps vowing to organize.
Some weeks after Rubens’ disappearance, we see his youngest daughter putting on one of his dress shirts to capture a memory of his scent. Later we hear the children as young adults talking about when each realized their father wasn’t coming back.
The families and friends of the disappeared, we see, are left with no body to bury and no grave to visit. If it weren’t for the family’s memory, preserved in all those photos, Rubens might never have existed.
For years after the dictatorship’s end, Eunice, now a lawyer and human rights activist, carries on an uphill fight to have her husband’s death officially recognized. Finally, in a coda set in 2014, the memory of the long-dead Rubens reaches out again to a physically and mentally enfeebled Eunice as she watches a television report on a National Truth Commission that investigated the dictatorship’s crimes.
In Brazil, as in Faulkner’s American South, the past is not dead; it’s not even past.
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But the struggle for memory doesn’t stop there. In Brazil, that struggle is not only about the country’s past but also its future.
In 2019, Brazil’s right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, a military officer during the dictatorship, began efforts to restore public commemorations of the 1964 military coup he called a “revolution.”
Bolsonaro came to power after 12 years in which the Workers’ Party, led by former union organizer Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, had ruled the country, reducing poverty, raising wages, and supporting the rights of Indigenous people.
The Workers’ Party was only removed from power when Lula’s successor as president was impeached in 2016 on charges that later investigations have found dubious. Lula was preparing for a return to office in the 2018 elections when he was convicted in a corruption scandal. This paved the way for Bolsonaro’s election.
In the old days, that would have been the end of that. But Brazil has a free press now, and, shortly after Bolsonaro’s election, journalists got access to a trove of Telegram messages showing that Sergio Moro, a judge overseeing Lula’s trial, had been secretly colluding with the prosecution.
Upon review, Lula’s charges were dropped, and he defeated Bolsonaro in the 2022 election. Bolsonaro, however, waged a Trumpian campaign of election denial. His supporters even staged a January 6-style rampage through government buildings in the nation’s capital, calling for a coup.
More recently, justice officials have learned that a coup was in fact being planned. Bolsonaro has been accused of crimes related to the election’s aftermath, and a group of military men have been charged with plotting to assassinate Lula and his vice president.
In Brazil, as in Faulkner’s American South, the past is not dead; it’s not even past.
In I’m Still Here, the Paivas are a thoroughly secular family. However, the Brazilian Catholic Church is an important part of that country’s larger story.
In 1964, the church hierarchy supported the military coup, but this changed. In the 1970s, prodded by hundreds of thousands of members of ecclesial base communities and fronted by courageous hierarchs such as Archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara of Recife and Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of São Paulo, the church provided much of the fuel and fervor for the popular resistance to the dictatorship.
In 2014, coinciding with the National Truth Commission report, Brazil’s national bishops’ conference issued a statement confessing the church’s early complicity in the coup and its aftermath. In 2023, the bishops condemned all attempts to overthrow the country’s presidential election.
This article also appears in the May 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 5, pages 36-37). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Sony Pictures Classics
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