A mother's resilience becomes revolutionary in I'm Still Here

The dizzying part of living under an authoritarian regime is how it makes the very act of caretaking feel like a radical act. When maintaining a home in the face of encroaching fear and paranoia, surveillance and retaliation become emblems of opposition. Yet the mere appearance of normalcy can often also feel indistinguishable from capitulation. In I’m Still Here, director Walter Salles looks back at a pivotal moment in recent Brazilian history to lay bare the ways resilience and resistance are best deployed—not with a furrowed brow or a self-righteous pat on the back, but with a sly smile.

In the early 1970s, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres), and their five children live an idyllic life in Rio de Janeiro. They live right by the ocean, and every day is littered with small joys: a home-cooked meal, a new adopted pup, a game of foosball. Sun-dappled shots of this domestic bliss slowly make way for hushed whispers and rushed plans that suggest not everything is as perfect as it may appear. Their oldest daughter Vera (Valentina Herszage), for instance, witnesses firsthand how military checkpoints can disrupt a fun evening at the movies with her friends—cracking down in response to the increasingly disruptive actions by far-left revolutionaries (including the kidnapping of the Swiss ambassador).

What at first feel like peripheral concerns soon arrive at the Paiva household. A group of men show up and demand Rubens accompany them for questioning. To Eunice and the kids (who see their house cloistered and surveilled by men who stay, insisting they’ll leave once Rubens comes back) it’s a jolting realization, especially once the question becomes not when but if Rubens will ever come back. All Eunice can do is wait, and care for her children and her household. That becomes harder still when she is taken, as is her teenage daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), for days on end, interrogated by a military intent on rooting out dissenters and those who’d aid and abet them.

Eunice Paiva’s story, which I’m Still Here traces from the early years in the 1970s through her eventual release and the many years she then fought to get any information about what happened to Rubens—who never did return—is told not within the trappings of a thriller but the rhythm of a domestic drama. Like Eunice, I’m Still Here refuses to allow the forces of the military regime—their fearmongering and their violence—to enter the storytelling frame. Instead, the script by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, which adapts a memoir by Rubens’s son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, stays close to Eunice and her home—literally. The film witnesses what a patriarch’s disappearance does to a household, to its finances, to its very existence. But the film also traces this loss in Torres’s face, which Salles and cinematographer Adrian Teijido capture with loving scrutiny.

Therein lies the beauty and strength of I’m Still Here: the resilience of its title manifests in Eunice not only in anguish or anxiety. Hers is a grit that refuses despondency. At one point, when Eunice is hoping to leverage the press to pressure the government to take accountability for Rubens’ disappearance, the mother of five gathers all her children for a photo op. As ever, she’s eager to keep the tone light. She may have needed to let go of her housekeeper and all but let go of the dream house she and Rubens were hoping to build, but still she’s intent on creating a vision of a happy family. Not because Rubens’ disappearance hasn’t taken a toll, but because their smiling faces (which those on the other side of the shoot find inappropriate) are an act of resistance.

This is true of I’m Still Here as well. The Paiva family, who enjoy makeshift dance parties at their home and sending 8mm home movies to accompany letters sent from abroad, are no mere footnote to Rubens’ disappearance. Theirs is not a lurid story about the lengths to which the military went to silence dissenters, nor are they victims to be pitied for their circumstances. In Salles’ telling, they, like Eunice, are civilians who made the best of what they were dealt. Rubens had secretly been helping dissidents, but I’m Still Here knows better than to make him a hero, let alone a martyr. Instead, it knows that the real story lies in Eunice, in the way she’s called to still raise five kids who may not fully understand why their father is suddenly gone. Torres, who anchors much of the film (her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, takes over in the film’s 2014-set epilogue) is a revelation—she turns in a skillful depiction of what resilience takes from you and what you in turn can take from it. 

Torres’ performance dazzles with its restraint; keyed into the melodrama Eunice finds herself in, Torres nevertheless finds a way to emote even when she’s not saying or showing much. Eunice, for the good of her children and her own wellbeing, remains steadfast in keeping her feelings at bay. Even when she remains impassive (in front of a bank clerk who informs her she cannot withdraw funds without Rubens’ signature; next to her kids who play in the back of the car as horrid news floods the radio), Torres finds ways to suggest what’s always hovering at the edge of her prim smiles. This is what mothers are skilled at doing on any given day: not just hiding the world’s horrors from entering the household, but projecting the groundedness required to make a home a safe haven. 

As I’m Still Here flashes forward, first to 1996 and then to 2014, twinned epilogues that suggest how Eunice’s stoicism opened up a new life for herself and her children, it becomes clear that Salles has artfully chronicled in miniature the history of an entire country. His insistence to tell this story within the confines of a family drama feels all the more artful and affecting because of it. Heartrending yet never maudlin, I’m Still Here is a humanist drama that, in shining a light on insidious injustice, becomes a balm to warn and warm its audiences in equal measure.

Director: Walter Salles
Writer: Murilo Hauser, Heitor Lorega
Starring: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Fernanda Montenegro
Release Date: January 17, 2025