Best Picture Nominee I'm Still Here Warns About What We Lose to Autocrats

For a film about the Brazilian military dictatorship's forced disappearance of citizens, Walter Salles' I'm Still Here fixates on soufflés to a fascinating degree. The delicate French dish is mentioned several times throughout the film and provides an apt metaphor for the film's form as well as its content. Made of spare and simple ingredients, a proper soufflé requires patience and precision. Such is the case with Salles' film. I'm Still Here elevates the standard historic biographical film with its measured approach and nuanced performances. The film is up for three Oscars this year, including Best International Film, Best Actress, and Best Picture — the first Brazilian film to be nominated in the Academy Awards' top category.

I'm Still Here, based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva's 2015 memoir of the same name, documents his father's disappearance and the unimaginable toll it takes on his entire family. The film orbits around Eunice, the matriarch, played by a resplendent Fernanda Torres, and her decades-long quest for truth and justice. On a routine day in 1971, the Paiva family's idyllic existence is irrevocably changed after Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a former politician, engineer, and father of five, fails to return from an interrogation. The Paivas' story is at once ordinary — it happened to countless Brazilians over the course of the repressive regime — and extraordinary in Eunice's steadfast and awe-inspiring resistance and perseverance.

As a genre, the historical biopic can range from stale to overly melodramatic, but I'm Still Here avoids these pitfalls with its unique blend of ingredients. The most striking is the film's 35mm cinematography, which captures the texture of the 1970s and the way the Paivas' sun-drenched world begins to desaturate in the face of grim realities. The interplay of sound and production design reinforces the authenticity of the world Salles and his crew create: Rubens' disappearance silences the familiar sounds of music and children playing as the house falls under shushed tones and paranoia over someone listening. The Paivas' lived-in home, with posters adorning the children's walls and Rubens' library full of books and ideas, are hollowed out later as Salles' camera flows through vacant rooms.

The marriage of craft and storytelling is admirable, but the not-so-secret ingredient of I'm Still Here is Torres' astounding performance. Her portrayal of Eunice is stoic and pragmatic, but never without warmth or emotion. She portrays a steely resolve against the raw nerve of her experience. She is present for her children, while at the same time absent in her grief over her husband. It's a tour-de-force that reaches a silent crescendo in an ice cream shop. The supporting cast should not go unmentioned as they create fully realized characters with scant screen time. Mello, as Rubens, creates such an impact in his brief time on screen that his absence haunts the remainder of the film. Each child manages to convey their own unique perspective, fears, and desires, deepening Eunice's mission to keep her family together.
The script covers the timespan from 1971 through the 2010s, but it is remarkably concise. While the crux of the film is Rubens' disappearance, Salles crafts an extended prologue and epilogue. The former vividly establishes the Paivas' world before Rubens' absence and makes the spectator feel the pang of loss. The latter illustrates Eunice's prolonged dedication to human rights beyond her own experiences through her work with Indigenous people in Brazil. The editing rhythmically transforms from domestic drama to political thriller and back again with ease, undulating between the duration of waiting and the tension of an ever-looming threat. Salles and his team understand that this is a film about resistance rather than revolution.

Interestingly, an actual soufflé does not appear until the film's end, when Eunice's children unsuccessfully attempt her recipe. The soufflé in I'm Still Here is more than food, it is a collective memory, a shared taste, the family's connection to celebration and comfort. It is what the dictatorship destroyed on that day in 1971, and yet it is their resistance as well. I'm Still Here is a tribute to the power of memory for an individual, a family, and a nation. It manifests in the family films and photographs that punctuate the film.

George Santayana, a philosopher who lived through World War II but passed before the dictatorship in Brazil, proclaimed, "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." It is impossible to divorce I'm Still Here from this sentiment and the present day. Salles' film arrives after recent films exploring the rise and fall of South American dictatorships, such as Andreas Fontana's eerie Azor (2021) or past Best International Film nominee Argentina, 1985 (2022) by Santiago Mitre, and is in conversation with recent dystopian Brazilian cinema like Gabriel Mascaro's Divine Love (2019) and Anita Rocha da Silveria's electric Medusa (2021).

It is more than happenstance that I'm Still Here's source material, Paiva's memoir, was published only four years before the rise of far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro or that the film arrived in theaters about two years after his failed coup d'etat to remain in power. It reverberates beyond Brazil and echoes closer to home. Perhaps Bolsonaro's failure is connected to the cultural memory of the Brazilian people and Eunice's work. I'm Still Here is a warning about how quickly bad actors — call them fascists, autocrats, totalitarians, whatever — can take hold of a nation, family, and individual, and how painfully slow recovery can be after they are finally forced to relinquish power.