Part of Best Picture Marathon
Rio de Janeiro, 1970. Brazil’s dictatorship sought to exert its authority through detentions and disappearances. Life in the merrily crowded Paiva household is warm and jovial, despite the threat of spot checks and arrests that loom over every outing. When patriarch Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman forced to live in exile during the previous decade, is ushered away to provide a mysterious deposition to military interrogators, officers come for his wife Eunice (a superb Fernanda Torres), holding her 12 days in a windowless prison as they try to persuade her to incriminate friends and associates accused of leftwing activities. Eunice emerges from prison transformed, embarking on a journey to expose the government’s illegal activities and refusals to acknowledge their role in the disappearances of thousands of innocent citizens. Part of what gives I’M STILL HERE its tremendous power is the way Salles and his collaborators give equal weight to the personal and the political. This is an engrossing, deeply moving film about ordinary people who refuse to hide when the tempests of history come calling. Brazil’s Official Selection for the 2025 Academy Awards.
“Walter Salles’ superb factually-based film — he was a real-life friend of the Paiva family as a teenager — is an engrossing, affecting tribute to a formidable woman and her family…. Salles never over-labours the film’s emotional beats, relying instead on Torres’ magnificent, intricately layered performance to drive the picture.” —Wendy Ide, ScreenDaily
“In vintage, spongy colors, interspersed with home movies shot by the eldest, movie-and-music-mad daughter, Vera (Valentina Herszage) on a handheld Super 8 camera, DP Adrian Teijido’s gorgeously tactile photography gives the whole film the texture of a story not being told but remembered. As soundtracked to Gilberto Gil sambas and Caetano Veloso hits, and elsewhere to Warren Ellis’ lovely piano and strings score, there’s a melancholy in even the brightest moments of family togetherness” —Jessica Kiang, Variety
“Adrian Teijido’s agile cinematography uses 35mm to great grainy effect to evoke the ‘70s and Super 8mm home movies shot during that decade provide lovely punctuation… I’M STILL HERE is a gripping, profoundly touching film with a deep well of pathos. It’s one of Salles’ best.” —David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter