In the early 1970s, the military dictatorship in Brazil reaches its height. The Paiva family - Rubens, Eunice, and their five children - live in a beachside house in Rio, open to all their friends....
WHAT I LIKED: If Walter Salles' 'I'm Still Here,' won't make you angry, I don't know what will.
The film starts by introducing a beautiful family - Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), her ex-diplomat husband Rubens (Selton Merro), and their five children - playing on the beach in Rio de Janeiro and heading back to their seafront home. They host get togethers with friends, plan a new home for themselves, and laugh and fuss over the kids' future plans, and through an admirable amount of time in the first act we get to know this wonderfully lively, funny bunch of real people very well indeed.
All the while though, Rubens makes secret phone calls and the threat of a new army presence looms, then eventually some men come to the house and take Ruben, and later Eunice herself, for "questioning." It's Brazil in the early 70s, and the new dictatorship are imprisoning, torturing and murdering ex-political opponents like Ruben, and anyone they think might be conspiring against their rule.
The reason this makes you so angry is because of how well the film shows it disrupting the family's life. When the men are in Eunice's house, Torres does such an incredible job of showing quiet defiance and suppressed fear. Then when she's imprisoned herself, it's properly hard to watch given how helpless she is and how little she knows about how long she'll be there. The fact this happened to so many people is awful, and that's only confounded by the knowledge that similar things went down in Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Suriname too as the US government supported coups against any left-wing governments that cropped up in the region and helped to install military dictatorships instead. America has a long history of supporting regime change to serve their own Capitalist interest, and they even tried the same thing in Venezuela in 2020, and succeeded with it in Peru in 2022.
After the film is done making you angry about all of that though, the third act turns into a touching musing on memory and dealing with trauma. Initially Eunice tries to bury it and move on, but eventually she and the kids come to embrace the memories and try and come to terms with it. All together, that makes this an emotional rollercoaster of a film that brilliantly humanises the real damage that political violence can have on people's lives.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: The film could have done more to spell out the US's involvement for Western audiences, but it's not really about that.
VERDICT: Thanks to its impactful story and grounded execution, Walter Salles' 'I'm Still Here,' brilliantly brings home the real effects of political violence.
