I'm Still Here

Walter Salles’s 2024 Brazilian drama *I’m Still Here* (*Ainda Estou Aqui*) adapts Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir about the disappearance of his father during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Set largely in Rio de Janeiro in 1971, the film follows the Paiva household before and after agents take Rubens Paiva, a former congressman, from his home. Selton Mello plays Rubens; Fernanda Torres plays his wife, Eunice. Their five children initially know little about where he has gone. Eunice is herself detained and questioned, then returns to a family whose ordinary routines have become inseparable from fear and uncertainty.

The film spends time with the family before Rubens’s arrest: meals, visiting friends, and afternoons near the beach establish what his disappearance interrupts. Rather than turning his fate into a mystery that Eunice can solve, the story stays close to what she and the children can learn. The authorities provide no truthful account of his whereabouts. Eunice must manage the household, protect her children, and pursue answers while the state responsible for his detention refuses to acknowledge what happened. Rubens Paiva was killed in custody, but his family’s struggle for official recognition lasted decades.

Salles also follows Eunice beyond the immediate aftermath. She studied law and became an advocate for human rights, including the rights of Indigenous Brazilians. Fernanda Montenegro portrays Eunice in later life, connecting the events of 1971 to their long consequences. Marcelo Rubens Paiva, one of the children shown in the film, published the memoir on which it is based in 2015. That family connection gives the account a particular perspective: the political violence is seen not only through arrests and interrogations, but through the years of work required of those left behind.

*I’m Still Here* premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, where Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega won the screenplay prize. Torres won the Golden Globe for best actress in a motion picture drama for her performance as Eunice. At the 2025 Academy Awards, the film received nominations for best picture, best actress, and best international feature film; it won the last of those, becoming the first Brazilian film to win that Oscar. These honors brought wider attention to a story rooted in a documented disappearance and in one family’s efforts to confront it. The film’s final perspective belongs to Eunice: not as a bystander to Rubens’s story, but as someone who built a public life while insisting that his absence be recorded truthfully.