From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Brazil was governed by a far-right military dictatorship. Rulers enforced strict censorship, reduced freedom of speech, and imprisoned, tortured, and killed many who opposed the regime to any degree.
A memoir of this time by Marcelo Paiva is the basis of I’m Still Here, a film directed by Brazilian Walter Salles that poignantly illustrates the nation’s fear and anxiety by depicting the effects of a single arrest on an upper class family member. An outstanding Fernanda Torres plays Eunice, a wife and mother who shepherds her five children through years of both personal and material loss.
If Torres does not receive an Academy Award for her performance, she should know that the voters made a huge mistake.”
Torres shows strength, sadness, pain, anger, resolve, optimism, intelligence, and an always present determination to protect her children. The film follows the family through the 1970s and ’80s, through Eunice’s own imprisonment and the challenges of taking on new roles in an uncertain national context.
The film jumps ahead to show Eunice and her children in the 1990s, after Brazil’s return to democracy, and then again to 2014 when Eunice is 85 years old. The actors portraying the children—both as youths and as adults—are convincing in their reactions to home displacement and to their mother’s decisions.
Torres is in most scenes, and she carries the movie and its message through her portrayal. If Torres does not receive an Academy Award for her performance, she should know that the voters made a huge mistake.
I’m Still Here covers a sad political period, with great acting. It is in Portuguese with subtitles, but that in no way diminishes the informative and moving effect of this film. At the film’s end, when I saw the movie, no one in the theatre rose to leave while the credits rolled.
Editor’s Note: I’m Still Here is now playing at The SLO Film Center at the Palm Theatre.