Across Brazil, millions of bedazzled, buzzed, and barely clothed people are in the streets, dancing. But later tonight, at the peak of Carnival, something unusual will happen. The biggest party on earth will pause for a moment, and many of them will crowd around their televisions to see the country’s first-ever Best Picture nomination—Walter Salles’ dictatorship-era drama I’m Still Here—competing at the Oscars.
Despite far-right social media’s attempts to boycott the film and lower cinema attendance rates, I’m Still Here has become one of Brazil’s highest-grossing films and is the first to earn three Academy Award nominations. It’s worth taking stock of this success, and not just because it comes in a country where, for the most part, only films like My Mom is a Character 3 achieve similar dominance at the box office. For many Brazilians, my family included, the film is also deeply personal—reviving memories long left unspoken.
Brazil, which only became a democracy in 1985, has long had a film industry wary of political themes that could alienate audiences and reduce profits. In a way, it’s understandable. The country is more divided now than ever before. Former President Jair Bolsonaro, who has said that the only error of the military dictatorship was that it “tortured, but did not kill,” lost the 2022 election by a narrow margin of 2.1 million votes.
Just eleven days ago, when prosecutors announced charges against Bolsonaro and thirty-six others for their plans to orchestrate a military coup following his 2022 defeat, Brazilians were reminded of just how precarious our democracy is. And yet, from last Friday to next Saturday, people of all political and social stripes will come together to celebrate, as they do every year.
Brazil has always existed in contradiction—dancing through its pain and singing in the face of crisis. This tension lies at the heart of Salles’ film, which follows Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) and her family, whose comfortable, upper-middle-class life is shattered when her husband Paiva, a 41-year-old politician, is suddenly taken from their home by agents of Brazil’s military dictatorship, never to be seen again.
The first part of the film—beautifully shot in both 35mm and the grainy intimacy of a handheld Super 16 camera—shows us the large and happy Paiva family as they move through sunny 70’s Rio. Rubens (Selton Mello), is a successful engineer and former congressman who has recently returned from political exile after a period of turmoil. The family’s comfortable beachfront home is filled with books, friends, dancing, and the music of Caetano Veloso and Tom Zé. The dictatorship exists only in the background—a roadblock, a helicopter buzzing over the beach, military trucks passing by, the hum of the evening news.
Then, one evening, their domestic bubble explodes. Armed men arrive at their door and insist Rubens come with them to make a statement. He calmly changes into his suit, and, with a smile, reassures his daughter, “I’ll be right back.” He is never seen again.
Rubens’ wife, Eunice, and her teenage daughter are also imprisoned and tortured by the military police but are later released without answers. At first, Eunice goes into denial, repeating what she has been told—that Rubens will return. Days pass. Then weeks. We follow Eunice as she realizes he will not return and spends the rest of her life searching for the truth.
Worlds of pain and suffering lie beneath Fernanda Torres’ brilliantly stoic mask, which always seems not far from tears and equally far from rage. The cold, bureaucratic phrases she hears repeatedly—“Unfortunately, I can’t help you.” “I don’t have that information”—ensure that we witness Rubens’ fate just as she does, forcing the audience to grasp the horror concealed between these terse lines.
Salles’ restraint makes the film’s final half—a slow burn offering no real resolution—a deeply frustrating experience. The closest we get to visual closure is the burial of the family dog after it is hit by a car. A coda set in 1996 shows the Brazilian state’s reluctant issuance of Rubens Paiva’s official death certificate; another in 2014 shows Eunice, now suffering from Alzheimer’s, recognizing her husband’s face on television.
Unlike Baptism of Blood (2006) or Marighella (2019), which foreground the dictatorship’s violence, I'm Still Here—like Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest—denies the audience the spectacle of brutality, keeping it just beyond the camera’s frame. Instead, the film insists that not knowing and not seeing can be even more excruciating, both for Eunice and us.
This choice is reflected in the spaces the film chooses to foreground. Instead of shadowy interrogation rooms or explicit scenes of torture, Salles centers the film on the place where the absence of violence is felt most acutely—the home. At first, it is filled with sunlight, noise, and movement; then, it is drained of life, darkened, and emptied out as they move to São Paulo. It is in the home that Eunice’s battle is fought, not just in the appeals courts. Holding her family together in the face of catastrophe, nurturing and supporting her five children, not crying once—Salles transforms this quiet endurance into a kind of tragic heroism that feels banal next to violent resistance yet no less difficult.
This is a large part of what gives the film its wide-reaching resonance. For my mother’s family—four girls and one boy named Rubens (after my grandfather), just like in the film—the dictatorship was lived not on the frontlines of the fight but in the everyday; it was only discussed in the home. Life was full and vibrant, yet repression loomed like a cloud.
My uncle, an unabashed Marxist, was tailed at his university. My mother recalls more days of strikes than of class. The house next door to my grandparents’, where they often went after school, was trashed by government agents multiple times. They listened to the same music, drove the same cars, vacationed in the same town, and shot films with the same cameras. “Watching the film,” my uncle told me, “it was as though we were dreaming.”
I had grown up hearing these stories only in snippets. Like the country itself, my family seemed to have pushed them aside as they focused on building their own lives and careers. But after the film came out, my mother’s siblings—now living all over the world—began writing in our family WhatsApp group, sharing the emotional memories it had unearthed.
Maybe I’m Still Here strikes such a deep chord across different classes and ages because, in Brazil, we always have to do what Eunice does—pretending everything is normal when it isn’t.
“I’m Still Here” by Walter Salles is playing at the Princeton Garden Theatre this week.
Alex MacArthur is a history major in the class of 2025. He can be reached at asm5@princeton.edu.
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