It may be axiomatic, but it’s still profound: our sense of self is determined by the accumulation of our memories. That’s why science fiction has obsessed over the idea of technologies that might delete or alter memory, and thus the memory-holder. It’s also why it’s so devastating to watch a loved one lose their memories, becoming some other person in the process.
This is true on the broader level, too; societies, after all, are just groups of people who share memories. Filmmakers from around the world, but especially from South American countries, seem particularly attuned to this fact lately. They propose that you can reshape the character of a group of people by messing with collective memory, and that’s why governments are often keen to brush over the past. In the last few years, acclaimed movies such as “Azor,” “The Eternal Memory” and “Argentina, 1985” have explored the personal impact of the mass disappearances under military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. More broadly, they show how attempts to deny or ignore those disappearances have lasting effects on those who survived.
The beautiful, gutting “I’m Still Here” joins these with its own story, this one in Brazil. Directed by Walter Salles, one of the country’s most celebrated filmmakers, “I’m Still Here” is based on the 2015 memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, whose father, the congressman Rubens Paiva, was among the estimated 20,000 people who were tortured during the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.
Skillfully crafted and richly shot, “I’m Still Here” begins in Rio de Janeiro in 1970 when, despite the encroachment of the military on daily life, the sizable, loving Paiva family is largely living in domestic bliss. Rubens (Selton Mello) has recently returned home from six years of self-imposed exile, following his ouster from government during the revolution. He and his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), have five children, four daughters and a son, ranging in age from grade school to older teens. They live near the beach, entertain friends, dance in the living room and have a happy, bustling home. Rubens is still working to support political expatriates, but he keeps his activities out of his family’s sight.
One day, though, the couple’s daughter Vera (Valentina Herszage) is stopped and searched by the authorities while driving home from a movie with friends. Soon after, news of left-wing activists kidnapping the Swiss ambassador breaks, kicking off a period of instability that rapidly escalates. When men show up at the Paiva home, demanding Rubens come with them to some unknown place for questioning, Eunice and the children know something is happening. Rubens doesn’t return. And then Eunice and her daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) are brought in for questioning, too.
This is the moment when the film pivots toward Eunice, who is not just the heroine in the film but in real life, too. This movie is her story: She is a woman whose life has been ripped to shreds, deciding that she will not be cowed. She will not only make a life for her children under immense, repressive odds, but pour herself into changing the world, too. In her performance — which won a Golden Globe and is aiming at an Oscar nomination — Torres stuns. Protecting her children means leaning into joy within the fear, hope in the midst of pain. Torres double-layers her performance with all of those emotions, and her searching eyes are magnetic.
But this is not just a movie about a strong woman, though it certainly is that. It’s also about what authoritarian regimes do to keep people in line, the totalitarian tactic of making people doubt what they know they’ve seen by insisting on unabashed lies. It’s not as if anyone barges into the Paiva home with guns and handcuffs — though Rubens’s privileged status as a former elected lawmaker and public figure, it’s suggested, has something to do with that.
Rather, the control comes through mind games and gaslighting, through denying the plain truth the family can see before their eyes. Official government claims of Rubens’s escape from confinement are obviously false (it took until 2014 for anyone to be charged with his death), and the family is left in limbo. It’s infuriating to watch, all the more because it really happened, and not just to the Paivas.
“I’m Still Here” stretches its storytelling across decades, tracing the long arm of the disappearances and their effect on a country, even when some might prefer to move on, to forget the past atrocities committed by those who are no longer in power. When a reporter asks Eunice if they shouldn’t just pay attention to more urgent issues than “fixing the past,” she firmly disagrees. Families should be compensated for the crimes, but more important, the country needs to “clarify and judge all crimes committed during the dictatorship,” she insists. “If that doesn’t happen, they will continue to be committed with impunity.”
“I’m Still Here” was released in Brazil in November 2024. Despite far-right campaigns urging people to boycott the film, it has been a huge hit, the highest-grossing Brazilian film in the country since the Covid-19 pandemic. Some have noted that the film hits hard in a country that — unlike Chile and Argentina — has never officially pursued accountability for the military’s role in torturing and murdering citizens during the dictatorship. The movie was also released just as details emerged of a plotted coup to keep former President Jair Bolsonaro, who defended the military dictatorship, in power after he lost the 2022 election.
So the film’s popularity is no mystery. Yet “I’m Still Here” does not present as a simple polemic about a historical and political situation, and that’s the secret to its global appeal. It’s also a moving portrait of how politics disrupts and reshapes the domestic sphere, and how solidarity, community and love are the only viable path toward living in tragedy. And it warns us to mistrust anyone who tries to erase or rewrite the past. Throughout the story, Salles repeatedly shows the family shooting photographs and Super 8 film that preserve their memories. The director has said that movies are “instruments against forgetting, and that he believes “cinema reconstructs memory.” With “I’m Still Here,” he’s aiming to make sure nobody can forget.
I’m Still Here
Rated PG-13 for what happens during life under dictatorship, including sounds of torture. In Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters.
