REVIEW: “I’m Still Here” (2024)

WRITER’S NOTE: The following was originally posted on my Facebook page on February 28, 2025. 

In early-1970s Rio de Janeiro, wife and mother Eunice Paiva lead her family (four daughters and one son) after her husband Rubens disappeared. During this time, Brazil was under extreme military dictatorship, with officers on patrol, taking prisoners, and looking for those potentially involved with Communists and terrorists. While heavy in subject matter, Walter Salles’ biographical drama I’m Still Here is essentially a story of resilience, endurance, and family. 

This Best Picture and International Feature Film nominee at this season’s Academy Awards has arguably been getting a lot of traction since its victory at the Golden Globes last month, thanks to the lead performance by actress Fernanda Torres. (Her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, was nominated in the same category more than a quarter century earlier—for Salles’ 1998 film Central Station—and even makes a brief appearance in the film as an elderly Eunice.) 

Camcorder footage throughout not only captures the time, the culture, the music and other trends, but also familial and relational moments of joy, laughter, celebration, and community. Along with the central conflict, other subplots include the adoption of a stray dog, eldest daughter Veroca going to college, and a potential new home that Rubens plans and builds, with help from his family. These become all the more important when things suddenly take a turn. 

While there is poetry in an opening image of Eunice floating in the ocean with choppers flying overhead, and in younger daughter Nalu wearing one of her father’s shirts—thus keeping his memory and presence close—there are also quiet and/or intense moments of uncertainty and vulnerability. One difficult segment, when Eunice and one of her children are incarcerated for days (and particularly the sequence that follows), is, I believe, why Torres is being honored this year. It’s a courageous performance of a woman who discovers revelations she didn’t know (including what is true and what is fabricated), who searches and fights for proof of her husband’s arrest and disappearance (with a turning point that didn’t occur until a quarter century later), and who compels her family to press on at best, but not apart. One subsequent scene of an updated family picture has the photographer wanting Eunice and her children to look serious, though the matriarch insists that they keep their heads held high with hope and optimism.  

The real Eunice Paiva later becoming an activist not just for her family but also for those that suffered the same persecution during that period in history. She passed away in São Paulo in 2014, at the age of 89. Her son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, became an author and wrote the book of the same name that this film is based on. 

I’m Still Here has heartbreaking and bittersweet moments, and emotional devastation, to be sure. It also has a brief moment of non-gratuitous nudity, as well as two or three endings and resolutions—at least in this adaptation. But like its lead performance, it’s an extraordinary and harrowing drama that, thanks to those aforementioned camcorders and 8mm film strips, reminds us of what was, what was lost, what still is (hence, the film’s title), and how far they’ve come. This is one Best Picture-nominee this year that I can recommend (with discretion). 

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