TIFF’s I’m Still Here is an intimate portrait of a middle-class Brazilian family going about their daily lives while showing the grandiose perseverance of the human spirit. This powerful duality comes from the stellar performance by Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres as Eunice Paiva, the matriarch at the heart of this remarkable tale. By the time the credits roll, I’m Still Here leaves an emotional imprint about the importance of not forgetting the atrocities of the past and the power we have to overcome them.
Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles, who directed the Che Guevara biography Diarios de Motocicleta, brings us I’m Still Here with the story adapted from the memoir of the same name by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, where he recounts growing up during the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1970s. The movie focuses on his father Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) and his mother Eunice. She is played by Torres, Fernanda Montenegro’s daughter, who Salles had directed to an Oscars‘ Best Actress nomination in 1999’s Central Station – the only time a Brazilian woman has received this recognition by the Academy. Twenty-five years later, Brazil selected this film as its official submission to the Academy Awards, and the movie is taking the film festival circuit, with screenings in Venice and New York to accompany its reception in Canada.
When we first meet the Paiva family, including the couple’s five young children, they lead an idyllic existence in downtown Rio de Janeiro. Their home is across the street from Copacabana Beach, where the family spends lazy afternoons and weekends. The house is a meeting place of sorts, including for the Paiva’s various family friends and their housemaid Dalva (Maeve Jinkings). Evoking Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits, people come and go freely through the home’s quiet, moody interiors, which have witnessed a happiness that is fated to come to an abrupt halt. A military coup has just occurred, though at the beginning, stories of disappearances and state-sponsored torture are still a distant thing adults hear about from the kitchen TV and lament quietly, while the kids chase after each other unaware.
Rubens is a kind father and husband, chain smoking cigarettes and regaling friends and neighbors, including politicians from his past life as a congressman, with stories. It is Eunice who holds the family together, quietly doting on the children and ensuring they grow into good citizens while gladly participating in her husband’s salons and musings. While one suspects that little Marcelo (the fourth of the Paiva children) may have romanticized his childhood as happier than it was, it soon becomes clear why he has such fond memories of when his family was whole and together.
Unannounced, a band of threatening men arrive at the Paiva home and take Rubens with them. Eunice stays behind, projecting steely confidence but also deference to the invaders, for the sake of her home and her children. Fernanda as Eunice barely turns the dial on her performance, but she quietly and even chillingly exhibits her determination to protect her young ones. Soon she, too, is taken by the state police, and is held and captivity and tortured for twelve days while the screams of other prisons echo through the darkened backgrounds of her cell.
The rest of I’m Still Here focuses on Eunice’s continued determination to be a steadying and loving force in the life of her children, to shield them from all forms of suffering, while she devotes her life to her newfound purpose of understanding what happened to her husband and ensuring that the injustices that befell her family are not forgotten. Fernanda as Eunice stares far into the distance now, as if her experience had hollowed out her soul and made her a ghost of herself. But these stares also show how she’s moved her focus more thoughtfully to the future, its promises, and its potential. It is a quiet but powerful depiction of a woman whose existence was fundamentally tortured away from her, and who somehow became twice as strong from this harrowing experience.
The years go by, and non-Brazilian viewers will be surprised to discover towards the end of I’m Still Here that everything in the film is a true story. In today’s world, in which dictatorship can seem a foreign concept to most (though, sadly, not all) audiences, it is perhaps easy to forget some of the state-sponsored violence that until recently assailed most of Latin America. The story of incredible women like Eunice Paiva serves as an indelible reminder of these horrors. Through I’m Still Here, filmmaker Salles reminds us that Brazil still suffers from the raw scars of its recent past and the pain the nation inflicted on its own. He insists that these crimes not be forgotten.
Hence the name, I’m Still Here. For, it is not just the torturers and murderers that were determined to erase Eunice Paiva and her family. It is also the indifference of later generations, of the cruel passage of time that threatens to do so. But in I’m Still Here ,we see a woman who, perhaps surprising even herself, rises to the occasion because she believes in the value of peaceful human coexistence, and because she is so resolutely devoted to her own family. From those inspirations, she finds the strength to become something far different than the stereotypical role that society had been predetermined for her. In doing so, she saved her family not just from physical erasure but also from an emotional one. She quietly suffered her travails, refusing to let any of them get in the way of her children. She forcefully marched forward, to ensure that the crimes of the past were not repeated or forgotten.
She unequivocally reminded us, with every fiber of her being, “I’m Still Here.”
