I’m Still Here is among the finest films of the year and deserves to be seen by the widest possible audience. Walter Salles returns to Brazilian cinema with a devastating true story: the Paiva family’s experience under military dictatorship in 1970s Rio de Janeiro, specifically the disappearance of patriarch Rubens Paiva.
Fernanda Torres anchors the film with one of the year’s most remarkable performances. Her Eunice Paiva transforms across the film’s two-act structure from a vibrant, loving mother to a woman whose grief becomes a decades-long act of quiet resistance. The performance earned her the Best Actress prize at Cannes, and it’s entirely deserved.
Salles shoots with a naturalistic warmth that makes the film’s turn to darkness all the more crushing. The first hour is filled with life, music, and family joy — which makes the subsequent loss feel unbearable. This is filmmaking as empathy, as political act, as memory.
That the film is also compulsively watchable speaks to Salles’s mastery of pace and emotional rhythm.
