Original title: Ainda Estou Aqui
Brazil/France • DocuDrama • Year: 2024 • Running Time: 137 mins
Languages: Portuguese • French
Audience Response: 22 slips returned
- ‘Excellent’; 18 votes
- ‘Very Good’: 2 votes
- ‘Good’: 0 votes
- ‘Satisfactory’: 2 votes
- ‘Poor’: 0 votes
Read the comments here or visit the “I’m Still Here” discussion page to join in the conversation.
Synopsis:
As Brazil faces the tightening grip of a military dictatorship, Eunice Paiva, a mother of five, must reinvent herself and her family when authorities abduct her husband.
Mothers and wives often get the short shrift in movies like this, about Big Important Topics decided on by men, but Torres instills Eunice with a deep emotional and practical intelligence that’s beautifully feminine.
Lindsey Bahr (Associated Press)
Director: Walter Salles
The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) / Central Station (1998)
Writers: Murilo Hauser • Heitor Lorega • Marcelo Rubens Paiva
Main Cast:
| Fernanda Torres & Fernanda Montenegro | Eunice Paiva |
| Selton Mello | Rubens Paiva |
| Valentina Herszage & Maria Manoella | Veroca |
| Bárbara Luz & Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha | Nalu |
| Luiza Kosovski & Marjorie Estiano | Eliana |
| Guilherme Silveira & Antonio Saboia | Marcelo |
(for full cast list, additional technical information and reviews, please visit the I’m Still Here pages in IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes)
Film Notes:
At the recent Berlinale Film Festival, the writer Arundhati Roy withdrew after remarks from Wim Wenders, the chair of the jury committee, that “movies can change the world” but “not in a political way”. She was there to attend a screening of her restored 1988 film ‘In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones’ and said that Wenders’ words were “unconscionable”. She is quoted as adding that “To hear them saying that art should not be political is jaw-dropping. It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time”. She clearly had the situation in Gaza in mind. Wenders went on to qualify his position: “If we make films that are dedicatedly political we enter the field of politics…we are the counterweight of politics…the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians.”
Walter Salles has said about our film tonight, when it was nominated for an Oscar in 2025, that “Cinema, as opposed to noise, used to be at the heart of the Oscars”. What he meant by the term ‘noise’ we cannot be sure, but maybe we could guess. However, ‘I’M STILL HERE’ is essentially based on the actual ‘disappearance’ of the Brazilian ex-congressman and civil engineer Rubens Paiva at the hands of the then brutal military dictatorship. Once released from prison, Eunice, Rubens’s wife, admirably portrayed by the actress Fernanda Torres, is determined to do everything she can to find out what happened to her husband, and to hold her family together.
So is Wenders right? Will we be watching a movie about ‘people’, and hopefully bringing our own experience and political ideologies to bear, to draw conclusions and inferences, or just be ‘entertained’ – could this be what Salles meant by ‘noise’? – or both? When we watched ‘THE ZONE OF INTEREST last season we surely became absorbed by the people, the ‘characters’ whose lives we experienced and observed going about their daily lives, but also came away from the film with ‘political’ reactions? Watching our last screening, ALL THAT WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT, we were surely gripped by the ‘people’, the fascinating characters which featured in glorious close-ups, but maybe were left to reflect on the way ‘politics’ shaped, if not determined, their lives?