Walter Salles’ fact-based ‘I’m Still Here,’ among the best recent political films

This year AFI’s 38th festival screened several top-notch films with political themes. Here’s a review of Brazilian director Walter Salles’ fact-based I’m Still Here. Creator of Motorcycle Diaries, Salles rides again with one of the best political pictures in years.

It succeeds so completely because it is very much a family drama, but one that shows how politics can profoundly affect a family. Like Salles’ Argentine counterpart, Santiago Mitre’s 2023 Argentina, 1985 about the “Dirty Wars,” which was Oscar-nominated for Best International Feature Film and won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, I’m Still Here focuses on the impact military dictatorships have on ordinary South Americans.

The real-life Rubens (Selton Mello) and Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres when she’s middle aged and Fernanda Montenegro when she’s older) have five children together. Early on in a telling scene I’m Still Here cleverly shows how close this middle class family’s loving bonds are. Circa 1970, when the children encounter a stray dog on a Rio de Janeiro beach while playing volleyball, one of the sons takes the scraggly pooch to his dad’s nearby office to ask if the children can keep him. When told by presumably a secretary that his engineer father is in a very important business meeting and can’t be disturbed, the lad blithely ignores her and marches into his dad’s inner sanctum with the mutt. Instead of getting angry at being interrupted by his son, the bemused dad reluctantly acquiesces to his boy’s pleas to adopt the dog as a pet. In this family, love trumps business.

Likewise, very early on, the repressive rule of Brazil’s military dictatorship is quickly established when after the volleyball match, teenagers including the Paivas’ eldest daughter, are pulled over in their car in a tunnel to be roughly searched by military police, who are hunting for anti-junta “terrorists” who kidnapped a foreign ambassador.

The nurturing, intimate ties within the family, and the romantic love between the parents is genuinely heartwarming, and essential to the plot that unfolds. We eventually learn Rubens is a former congressman, and that he is involved in clandestine resistance activities opposing the military regime that seized power in Brazil following a U.S.-sponsored 1964 coup. I’m Still Here makes the point that the former member of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies was not part of the “armed struggle” opposing the junta, but rather took part in nonviolent acts such as surreptitiously passing correspondence by members of the resistance.

Inexorably, that dreaded knock on the door arrives at the Paivas household, and the secret police take Rubens off to god-knows-where to interrogate him. The rest of I’m Still Here dramatizes the family’s crusade, aided by members of the opposition, to find out where their father/husband/companheiro is and what actually happened to the former congressman. This is a truly heartbreaking movie, but as actor Selton Mello, who played the disappeared ex-deputy, told the AFI audience when introducing its screening, I’m Still Here “is an important, necessary film.” Indeed, given the fascistic (should I drop the “ic” now?) President-elect Trump’s threats to unleash the national guard, military, and hordes of MAGAts against “enemies within,” this drama about the repression by Brazil’s 21-year-old military dictatorship is especially relevant.

Salles’ 2004, Robert Redford exec-produced The Motorcycle Diaries, with Gael García Bernal as the young Che Guevara, won an Academy Award in a music category and received another nomination. 1998’s Central Station received two Oscar noms, for Best Foreign Language Film and for Fernanda Montenegro as Best Actress. Along with Santiago Mitre and his 2023 Argentina, 1985, as well as Chilean Pablo Larraín’s 2012 No and 2016 Neruda, etc., South America is leading the world in political cinema in the finest tradition of Sergei Eisenstein, Costa-Gavras, and Gillo Pontecorvo. Indeed, the title of I’m Still Here harkens back to Costa-Gavras’ Z, which translated from the Greek into English means “He lives”—a reference to another wronged anti-militarist leader.

For anyone who loves films with leftist themes, family sagas and top-notch acting, don’t miss the superlative, deeply moving I’m Still Here, which is likely to be remembered during awards season and proves that movies with humanistic progressive themes are also still very much here. Bravo!

I’m Still Here is 135 minutes long and mostly in Portuguese, with English subtitles. The trailer can be viewed here.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Ed Rampell

Ed Rampell is an LA-based film historian and critic, author of "Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States," and co-author of "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book." He has written for Variety, Television Quarterly, Cineaste, New Times L.A., and other publications. Rampell lived in Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii, and Micronesia, reporting on the nuclear-free and independent Pacific and Hawaiian Sovereignty movements.