‘I’m Still Here’ Review – Stability Under Strife

After a 12-year gap (his last film was the 2012 adaptation of On the Road), Golden Bear winner Walter Salles returns with a new feature set in his home country Brazil. Like many of his contemporaries, he is concerned with the country’s history of right-wing dictatorship. 

I’m Still Here is an up-close examination of political figure Rubens Paiva’s disappearance in 1971. It’s a story both meticulously specific and painfully universal in today’s age. Hisham Matar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Return, about his father’s disappearance in Libya, easily comes to mind. 

There are three ways to experience a dictatorship: by being born into it, by seeing it end, or by seeing it take hold. While wildly different experiences, the first two are much kinder alternatives to the third. Witnessing a dictatorship take full control of a nation is a slow and horrific process, where hope still hasn’t completely died, but any form of it can prove fatal.  

“It’s just a phase, it will pass,” says Rubens (played by Selton Mello) to his wife in the film as they debate sending their daughter to England amid a kidnapping wave by the National Liberation Action. NLA, as they were known, was a Marxist-Leninist guerilla group led by Carlos Marighella who opposed the dictatorship in Brazil (Wagner Moura’s 2019 biopic, Marighella, is another must-watch). The series of kidnappings and bank robberies was used by the military as an excuse to ramp up oppression. 

In the first part of the film, Rubens, a father of five, is seen living an almost regular existence. But there are glimpses of the horror that will follow. His daughter is aggressively frisked at a military checkpoint before she’s allowed to go home. Trucks drive by the beach while his family poses for a photo. Then there are the sketchy phone calls. For the most part, however, he continues his job as a civil engineer and plays his role as a father. We even see him sneakily change vinyl records to try to get his kids to stop listening to “gringo” music before eventually dancing with them.

Then one day, armed men show up at the house and ask to take him for a routine “disposition.” He kisses his wife and tells her “I’ll be back for the soufflé”. That will be the last time anyone will ever see him. 

“If this film was in English, Fernanda Torres would be first in line for the Best Actress Oscar.”

His wife Eunice, played by the incredible Fernanda Torres, is determined to help her husband in any way she can, but as she says in the film, she has “too many kids to raise”. Unable to access their finances (they were all in Rubens’ name), she finds a few leftover dollars from their travels and has them exchanged for the country’s currency. 

Despite all of this, she works hard to keep her composure in front of her kids, her jailers, and even the person who brings the news that her husband might be dead. 

If this film was in English, Fernanda Torres would be first in line for the Best Actress Oscar. If her other work was also in English, it wouldn’t even be her first. Her performance threads the line between determined and vulnerable, especially as the film goes from the story of a political assassination into, quite simply, the story of her survival. Carrying a delicate narrative on her shoulders is something Torres is very familiar with.

I’m Still Here is a reminder that no one expects the creep of a dictatorship. It’s as unfair as it is deadly. The only way to prevent it is to look at the past and stories like this and understand that they are as much about what happened, as what could happen.