Starring Fernanda Torres and centring on a family torn apart by Brazil’s military dictatorship, I’m Still Here is up for three major awards – and could pull off an upset on the night.
When the Oscar nominations were announced, the surprising strength of Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here – with nods for Fernanda Torres as best actress, best international film and most unexpected of all best picture – caused celebrations in Brazil. “I’m so proud! Kisses to Fernanda Torres and Walter Salles,” the country’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on X. Emotionally powerful and eloquent, the film tells the real-life story of a family living under Brazil’s two-decade military dictatorship, which ended in 1985. In 1971, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a former congressman, was taken by military police and never seen again, leaving his wife, Eunice (Torres), to create a future for herself and her five children. In the following years, as Eunice returns to school and becomes a prominent human rights lawyer, she never stops trying to find the truth about her husband’s fate and to hold the state accountable. And on the day the nominations were announced, 23 January, the film and reality intersected again. Paiva’s death certificate, which had declared him missing, was to reflect the reality that his death was “violent, caused by the Brazilian state”.
