I’m Still Here - Film Review - Fremantle Shipping News

I loved this remarkable film, a heartbreaking masterpiece of love, loss and resilience.

The film is a profound and poignant portrayal of Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), and his family’s personal tragedy during Brazil’s darkest chapter of dictatorship.

Set in 1971, the cinematography is stunning – from the sandy beaches of Rio de Janeiro, to the dark and harrowing scenes involving detention in a military prison. There are fast moving police car rides in VW Beetles (I used to drive one), lots of moustaches, cigarette smoking, brown suits, long collared shirts and glass tableware. Every shot immerses the viewer in light and dark that features in both the setting and the story.

The film doesn’t dumb down; it honours the truth about the horrors of a coup d’état in Brazil, abduction, torture and imprisonment. It highlights pain, resilience and love. It examines the cost of silence, deep-seated intergenerational trauma and the unbreakable bonds of family.

I was a teenager in 1971. It saddens me that all these years on, little in our world seems to have changed. And I wonder if films will open in 50 years time about the atrocities of our times?

Eunive Paiva (Fernanda Torres) is the beating heart of this film: she wears a stoic maternal mask, remains calm, almost dissociated; keeps her family together and manages to shield her five children from despair after her husband, a former congressman, is arrested and ‘disappears’ in 1971, at the hands of the military dictatorship. The dictatorship refuses to admit that he had been arrested, or that he may be dead. She moves her family to Sao Paulo. We follow her through the decades: returning to university and becoming a human-rights campaigner for Indigenous people, until 2014 as an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s disease. Btw, Fernanda Torres’ real-life mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who is 91 years of age, plays the character’s older-self.

Directed by Walter Salles, (remember his portrait of Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries?), this slow-moving political drama is compelling and anxiety inducing. I love how Salles uses family clips on sixteen-millimeter film and personal photos to introduce Brazilian family culture and the stunning Leblon Beach. The film I’m Still Here, is an adaptation of Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s same title memoir (the author is the son of Eunice and Rubens).