Marrakech International Film Festival: In the latest cinematic exploration of Brazil’s traumatic military dictatorship, director Walter Salles has crafted a deeply personal and politically charged film that serves as both a memorial and a call to collective remembrance. “I’m Still Here” emerges as a powerful testament to the resilience of those who survived one of the darkest periods in Brazilian history.
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The story is told through the eyes of a family Salles knew in Brazil. A family that suffered immense tragedy because of this dictatorship. Set against the backdrop of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, the film delves into a period of profound national trauma. Between 1964 and 1985, Brazil endured a brutal military regime that systematically suppressed dissent, with thousands of activists, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens “disappearing”—kidnapped, tortured, and often murdered by state security forces.
Families were torn apart, political opposition was crushed, and a culture of fear permeated every aspect of Brazilian society. The regime’s secret police maintained a ruthless system of political repression, using techniques of psychological and physical torture to silence any form of resistance.
Salles’ approach to this historical nightmare is remarkable in its intimacy. The film tells the story of a real-life family whose happy life is torn apart after the former congressman Rubens Paiva is abducted and murdered. The film centers on Rubens and his wife, Eunice, and their children.
“The story is told from the microcosm of family,” he explains, “but it’s told through Eunice’s eyes. We know as much as she knows.”
Set in Rio in the 1970s, the film opens with a symbolic scene in the sea that encapsulates the entire narrative.
As Salles describes it, “The first image of the film contains the film, as a whole, in many ways. Eunice Paiva [Fernanda Torres] is swimming in the water, but then there’s a helicopter that is flying too low. She anticipates what is going to happen.”
This moment sets the tone for a narrative that is intimate and expansive, told through the eyes of a woman facing unimaginable circumstances with great courage and restraint.
Salles notes some of the methods, including the intricate sound design, that capture Eunice’s experience. For example, when she is questioned after her husband’s disappearance, “She was in that place of torture that was completely nightmarish, and what she was hearing was probably the same forms of torture that led to her husband’s death.”
Salles knew the family. “I was 13 when I met them,” he recalls of the family that inspired the film. “The way they exercised free speech in that house. The way that nothing was really forbidden. You were asked to be part of the conversation, which was very different from my house, where there was a kind of barrier between generations. There wasn’t even a lock on the door.”
This is vintage Salles—a filmmaker known for his nuanced explorations of social and political landscapes. His previous works like “Central Station” and “The Motorcycle Diaries” have similarly used intimate personal narratives to illuminate broader societal struggles. He has consistently been a filmmaker who sees cinema as a form of social engagement, a tool for collective memory and potential transformation.
The film has struck a chord in Brazil. “Because of the pandemic and because of the regime we have, people ceased to go to the cinema to see their own reflection,” Salles observes. “And therefore, the film lent itself to this kind of collective experience.”
The film has sparked public discussions about historical accountability. Although the officers responsible for Ruben’s death were identified. They were never punished.
Rubens Paiva was a Brazilian engineer, politician, and activist who disappeared and was killed by Brazil’s military dictatorship. Paiva was also a federal deputy who was critical of the military regime. On January 20, 1971, he was arrested at his home in Rio de Janeiro by military agents.
Despite initial claims that he had escaped, he was actually tortured and killed during his detention. His body was never officially located until decades later.
In 2012, investigations revealed that Paiva was tortured and murdered by agents of DOI-CODI (Departamento de Operações de Informações—Centro de Operações de Defesa Interna), which was the intelligence and repression apparatus of the military dictatorship. In 2014, a Truth Commission report identified some military personnel as being responsible for his death, but without providing comprehensive legal accountability. The case remains a significant example of human rights violations during Brazil’s military dictatorship period.
“A lot of people are writing about the fact that justice was never served,” Salles notes. “There’s somebody asking every day to revise the law and to do it differently. To create a before and after.”
Salles sees the film as more than just a historical document. “We are living in an age of numbness,” he says. “Every time I’m a little bit depressed about the state of the world, I remember that after the Middle Ages came the Renaissance.” It’s a characteristically hopeful perspective from a filmmaker who has always seen art as a potential catalyst for social change.
What makes “I’m Still Here” so powerful is its unflinching look at a period many in Brazil would prefer to forget. “In opposition to what happened in Chile, the crimes committed by the dictatorship in Brazil were not punished,” Salles points out. “Nobody was put in prison. This has led many filmmakers to look at that period again.”
The film has been a success in Brazil despite pushback from Conservative groups. “They have not been effective,” he says.
It’s one of a number of projects he’s been working on. “It took some time to nuance the script after the book was published in 2015,” he said, referring to an account of this history by the couple’s son Marcelo Rubens Paiva, in the book of the same name.
Salles said: “In the past few years, I’ve worked on a few scripts. Actually one of them is ready, and you know I may do it in the future. But two of those screenplays that I really wanted to pursue, at some point were caught by the fact that the situation that they depicted wasn’t central anymore in Brazil. Because the speed with which the societal changes happen in Brazil is such that my act of anticipation wasn’t enough. So I had the impression that those films didn’t reply to questions that I needed to ask. This one did.”
