I admire Walter Salles’ work, and I’m especially fond of his acclaimed features Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries. He has returned to his Brazilian roots for another exceptional narrative, I’m Still Here…but he hastens to explain that it’s not the story, or the book by Marcelo Rubens Paiva that impelled him to create this deeply empathetic picture. It is the fact that he knew the Paiva family and spent time in their home, where intellectuals and artists gathered while living under military dictatorship in the early 1970s. He wanted to recreate their lives.
It’s difficult for an American to fully comprehend the emotional state of a family when its titular head—a devoted husband and loving father of five—is whisked away by the police, leaving no trace behind. This places Paiva’s wife, Eunice, and her brood in a constant state of fear, knowing that they are being surveilled. Eunice devoted the rest of her life to questioning and documenting what happened to her spouse, telling his story to anyone who would listen, as journalists outside of Brazil began to do.
We have seen families depicted on screen countless times but the five youngsters who comprise the Paiva household inhabit their roles completely. (Salles, who visited my class at USC, explained that he had them all live in the residence that he rented for production two weeks before filming began. He encouraged the children to decorate their rooms and allowed them to make up their own dialogue, based on the parameters he set for each sequence. It definitely paid off. And just as Alfonso Cuarón did for his autobiographical Roma, he tried to find an airy beachfront house that resembled the real dwelling as he remembered it in Rio de Janeiro.)
This chronicle of the desaparecidos (the disappeared) is chilling because it doesn’t provide answers to the simplest questions, like “why?” And by adding two epilogues involving actual family members—along with Fernanda Torres, the brilliant actress who plays Eunice, and the imposing 95-year-old Fernanda Montenegro—Salles deliberately blurs the line between documentary and dramatization. This is a very special film, now playing in theaters nationwide.