MOVIE REVIEW: I'm Still Here (Dir. Walter Salles, 2025)

'When did you bury him?' 'What do you mean?' 'When did you realise he wasn't coming back?'

Walter Salles’s historical-drama, I’m Still Here, based on the memoir, Ainda Estou Aqui, by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, is probably the Academy Award Best Picture nominee least familiar to the general filmgoing audience. Nominated for Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Feature, and Best Actress, I’m Still Here, follows Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) as she tries to keep her family together following the 1971 arrest and disappearance of her husband, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), at the hands of the 1967-1985 Brazilian military dictatorship.

I must hold myself accountable to a great shame before I continue with the review. Prior to watching, I’m Still Here, I was unfamiliar with the work of Walter Salles, Latin American cinema more broadly, and 20th century Brazilian history. That being said, the wonder of art, in particular the cinema, is that it is easily able to traverse these boundaries. There is nothing about this film which will cause difficulty for any English language monologuists who watches it. If you dare brave that inch high barrier of subtitles you will be rewarded with a film whose themes feel universal and whose performances sore to the highest.

I’m Still Here, despite being a film which never wavers from its focus on the Paiva family, speaks to something which can happen and which continues to happen around the world. This is a film which understands that the torture and murder of prisoners by states exists side by side with acts of humiliation, dehumanisation, and harassment. It is a film about dignity, and the attempt to maintain dignity at all costs and in the face of systems which abhor your dignity. The state carrying out the arrest and subsequent harassment campaign under the auspices of the prevention of terrorism reminded me most strikingly of Jim Sheridan’s 1993 film, In The Name of The Father, about the wrongful imprisonment of the Guildford Four, and Steve McQueen’s masterpiece depiction of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strikers, Hunger (2008). These are films which are about how the mechanisms of the state, combined with its media apparatuses, can (and will be) used to destroy lives. When one watches, I’m Still Here, it’s hard not to be left aghast by the lengths the Brazilian government’s plain clothed and unmarked security service go to in order to turn the screws on Eunice Paiva and her five children. Gang stalking, wire tapping, internment without charge, threats against her daughter who was living in London at the time, all of these the state security apparatus deploys against a family of private citizens. Why? For daring to ask the question of what happened to her husband, who was not formally arrested and charged with any crime. Who the state denies ever arresting at all despite his car being parked in their detention centre. As this is a film about the battle against an unreachable tyrannical force which operates through shady foot soldiers and a military class which refuses accountability, I’m Still Here celebrates every small victory the Paiva family achieve. It has to. And the audience feels the weight of each one of those as much as they feel the overwhelming fear and anguish of each defeat.

One of the things that I think makes this film so effective is that there is no divide between the personal and the political. The two are deeply entwined into every facet of the character’s lives. The spotless skies of afternoon at the beach are darkened by the passover of military helicopters. The banker is watched over by the dictator. The men working on behalf of Brazilian expats hiding in Chile are good, honest, family helping their comrades as if it were just a natural extension of their home/work life. Even the Paiva children, especially the three older girls, are pure ‘les enfants de Marx et de Coca-Cola’ in the pure sense of the late 60s mixing of leftist politic and popular culture. They have posters of La Chinoise (Godard, 1967) and Che Guevara, dance to Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin records, and discuss The Beatles in excited giggles. It evokes a cosmopolitan international political life wherein all these different cultural elements can feed into and out of each other and manifest in an aesthetic reality which is basically nonexistent in 2024. I think it is quite canny for Salles to incorporate these kinds of details into the films because it contrasts so violently the contrast between the political imagination and the political reality. To me, and maybe you don’t agree, it is too harsh to say that this is a juxtaposition of naivety versus reality. One should not blame teenage girls for engaging in pop music counter-culture without understanding the true violence of the revolutionary struggle and the brutality of the military regime, and I don’t believe that’s what Salles is doing at all. What seems to me to be the core of the question of the juxtaposition is how state violence is ultimately indifferent to culture whilst also seeking to dominate your experience of it. Pop music, movies, literature, these things are allowed to exist and will not be the grounds for your arrest but, because of the omnipresent surveillance apparatus, they will be used in order to paint a picture of you as a nonconformist if such a thing does benefit the state. You will not gain actual revolution through what you buy and consume, only the pleasure that what you are doing is counter-cultural, and being metropolitan, cultured, and educated, will ultimately not save you from a system which effects everyone at every class level.

I find myself thinking, in the 20 or so hours that have passed since I watched the film, about the relationship between Ruben and Eunice (Torres and Mello) as it’s depicted on screen. The way it is built, not through overbearing declarations of love, but the subtle intimacy of two people so far into their marriage. We see them reading together, eating together, playing backgammon together, and there is never a single doubt that this is a film about two people deeply in love with one another. This is entangled with a relationship to the image. I’m Still Here, the very title of the film, appears to me to be tied up in the film’s references back to image captured in photographs and in home movies. Even long after the context of the origin of the image has so long vanished from memory, Salles imbues the photograph, the home movie, with a sense of presence. The photograph captures the memory, and the memory comes alive when we encounter the photograph. Eunice clings to every photograph, every bit of newspaper scrap information, reactionary and supportive, in the hope that it somehow keep Ruben with her in presence. As I dwell on the film, I think back on what is perhaps the most significant scene in American cinema of the last 10 years, when, in Martin Scorcese’s Killer’s of the Flower Moon (2023), Robert De Niro’s William Hale tells DiCaprio’s Ernest Buckheart: “But you know what happens? People forget. They don’t remember. They don’t care.”

I’m Still Here carves a space for memory. A memory that passes through your fingers and reminds us that the political realities of the past are as real as the photographs in your house and that these echo into the present.

Postscript: I know when I talk about this film on the less savoury social media websites I do get attacked by elements of the Brazilian fascist movement, many I presume are bot accounts. If any of those people are real and reading this, I rebuke you with the words of the great Charlie Chaplin: “The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people.” NO PASARAN!

Ryan Sweeney (@thecautiouscrip/insta: teawitzizek)