Oscar-winner “I’m Still Here,” and the Importance of Memory
The film should be shown in schools, so the youth can reflect about what’s at stake when a government is exercising terror.
By Gina Montaner (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – Nearly thirty years ago, director Walter Salles dazzled us with the film “Central Station.” The Brazilian director has now done so again, with his new movie “I’m Still Here.” The film was nominated for an Oscar in two categories – Best International Feature Film and Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role – and on Sunday, March 2, took home the prize for the former.
Salles was interested in examining the theme of collective memory, including the memory of his own film career. Hence, in 1998 his leading actress was Fernanda Montenegro, one of Brazil’s cinema greats, in a story with profound social resonance; and in 2024, the leading role of “I’m Still Here” was played by Montenegro’s daughter, Fernanda Torres. She proved to have fully inherited the artistic talents of her mother.
The new film takes place in the 1970’s, when Brazil’s military dictatorship was tightening its control over the country after the military coup of 1964, under the rule of Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco. That dictatorship and successive military governments – all of them ruling with an iron hand – would last until 1985, leaving hundreds of Brazilians tortured or disappeared, and press freedom intensely persecuted. In brief, they were years of State terrorism in the name of the anti-Communist, anti-guerrilla crusade, with the overriding aim of quashing any manifestations of autonomy that might contradict the nationalist, fascist, ideology of the military leaders.
The chief value of “I’m Still Here,” in addition to its artistic merit, is Salles’ determination to reconstruct the historic memory amid one sector of society’s push to erase memory. Those were dark years, in which anyone deemed “suspicious” could end up in jail, with interrogations at the margins of the law. If they failed to survive the macabre odyssey, their remains would be sent to unmarked common graves. Thus, the numbers of disappeared accumulated, and their loved ones couldn’t even mourn them, because there was no official word to confirm they had died at the hands of their tormentors.
The most devastating aspect of the film is that it’s not fiction, but based on the 1971 disappearance of Rubens Paiva, a former deputy in Brazil’s Labor Party, who maintained ties with leftist exiles. Salles, who knew the Paiva family in his youth, first presents us with the family, comprised of the political leader, his wife Eunice, and their five children in the surroundings typical of Rio de Janeiro’s upper middle classes. The Paiva’s are a vibrant clan, and their home is a central meeting place for journalists, professionals, and artists. The children, four girls and a boy, happily divide their time between school and leisure.
But in the idyllic atmosphere of Rio’s beaches, the presence of armed soldiers is felt. They patrol the streets and search any youth they can in their war against the actions of the far-left guerilla movement. At that time, a man with long hair could be considered a subversive element. Marcelo and Eunice, the Paiva parents, worry when their children go out – given the father’s political commitment, any move could prove a dangerous misstep.
From one moment to the next, that vulnerable but happy existence shatters into a thousand pieces. Men in civilian clothes burst into the Paiva home and carry off the head of the family, to one of the feared detention centers from which it’s hard to emerge intact. That’s when Salles, who follows the thread of the journal that Paiva’s son kept at the time of this traumatic episode, centers his story around the figure of Eunice, the wife.
From one day to the next, she becomes the authority figure in a family nucleus that suddenly finds itself defenseless. It also forces the evolution of this woman, who up until then was dedicated only to raising her children. Not only does she defend her children from institutional barbarity but also champions the cause of her husband, whose disappearance would last for 25 years. The military denied having detained him by force, and it wasn’t until 1996 that the government finally recognized that Paiva had died in captivity. And it wasn’t until 2014, when Eunice – by that time a lawyer specializing in indigenous rights in the Amazon – received the death certificate of her life’s partner.
Is ”I’m Still Here” one more film about those who disappeared under the Latin American military dictatorships? We could mention a number of noteworthy films on this topic, such as the Argentine “The Official Story,” and “Argentina 1985;” or the film “Missing,” about a journalist from the US who disappeared in Chile under the dictator Pinochet. Salles’ film reinforces the importance, as the Brazilian filmmaker asserts, of “not losing the collective memory.” The same could be said of the extensive filmography on the Holocaust. The message “Never again,” can never be repeated enough.
“I’m Still Here,” is one of those films that should be shown in the schools, so that the youth, at times unaware of the barbaric acts that took place in the not-so-distant past, reflect on what’s at stake when the government is exercising terror. Who could have believed that in the United States, only a few days ago, in a meeting of international figures from the far right, they’d be launching hate speech with an arm raised in imitation of the Nazi salute? Those extremists would love us to forget the horrors of fascism or Communism. “I’m still here” is an immunization against that forgetting, which we mustn’t succumb to.
Published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.