SHREWSBURY FILM SOCIETY
| Director | Walter Salles |
|---|---|
| Country | Brazil |
| Year | 2024 |
I’m Still Here is a wrenching and deeply controlled drama from Walter Salles, built around an extraordinary performance by Fernanda Torres. The film revisits the real story of Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens, a former congressman and civil engineer, was abducted by Brazil’s military dictatorship in the early 1970s. His disappearance was never officially acknowledged at the time. For decades the state refused even to admit he had been arrested, and only in the mid 1990s did the family receive a formal death certificate. Salles, who knew the Paiva children when he was young, approaches this history with a mixture of personal familiarity and rigorous restraint.
The film begins in a beachfront house in Rio de Janeiro, where Eunice and Rubens live with their five children. Their home is full of books, art, friends and laughter. The growing militarisation of the city is present but distant, a background hum of helicopters and armoured vehicles that can be tuned out. Salles captures this early period with a warm, lived in texture, using 35mm film to evoke the domestic intimacy of the household. The first chapter of the story is a portrait of familial bliss, with beach games, ice cream afternoons and boozy dance parties. These scenes are not sentimental. They are the foundation against which the rupture will be measured.
The rupture arrives quietly. Men with guns come to the door and say they need Rubens to make a statement. He leaves with a promise to return for dinner, a line that carries a terrible weight because everyone, including Eunice, knows it is a lie. Eunice and her teenage daughter Eliana are also detained. Eliana is released after 24 hours, but Eunice is held for 12 days in a filthy cell and subjected to repeated interrogations. The trauma is profound, yet when she returns home she puts on a brave face, dresses in one of her immaculate trouser suits and begins the long campaign to find out what happened to her husband.
Torres plays Eunice with a stoic composure that becomes the film’s emotional centre. Her performance is almost entirely internal, the realisation of her husband’s fate unfolding gradually across her face. She never cries. Her self control becomes both a survival mechanism and a form of denial. The film suggests that the families of the disappeared often lived in a suspended emotional state, unable to grieve because the truth was withheld. When Eunice’s daughter returns from London years later, she is disturbed by her mother’s blankness and asks the question the audience may also be asking: are you OK.
Salles structures the film in three chapters, set in the early 1970s, 1996 and 2014. The later sections show Eunice relocating the family to São Paulo, going back to college and eventually becoming a human rights lawyer. Her advocacy for Indigenous communities is acknowledged, though the film remains focused on the emotional cost of her transformation rather than the political details. The screenplay, co written by Eunice’s son Marcelo Rubens Paiva, draws on a rich archive of family photos and home videos. The film also features a brief but devastating appearance by Fernanda Montenegro, Torres’s mother, playing Eunice as an older woman.
Salles uses different film stocks to capture different textures of memory. Grainy Super 16 conveys the energy of teenagers running through Rio’s streets, while the domestic scenes have a softer, more tactile quality. The soundtrack mixes Tropicália artists such as Tom Ze and Caetano Veloso with a brooding score by Warren Ellis, creating a soundscape that moves between irreverence and dread.
Among the film’s most affecting scenes is the moment when Eunice, having heard an unconfirmed rumour of Rubens’s death, takes her children out for ice cream as promised. She scans the room in anguish, each laughing family a reminder of what has been stolen from her. Another comes when the family prepares to leave Rio. The youngest child, Babiu, sits on the doorstep, her face a mask of grief. It is the moment she silently accepts that her father is never coming home.
I’m Still Here is not a conventional political thriller. It belongs instead to the lineage of films about motherhood shaped by loss, alongside works like Mildred Pierce and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. It is a story of endurance, of a woman who must hold her family together while carrying an unspoken grief. Salles’s direction is meticulous, and Torres’s performance is one of the most quietly powerful in recent cinema. The film’s emotional force lies in what is withheld, in the silence that fills the spaces where truth should be.
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