On the history we see—and the history we don’t—in “I’m Still Here.”
When Eunice Paiva first learns that her husband Rubens has been murdered in the Oscar-nominated film I’m Still Here, the audience only sees her reaction to the news, but never actually hears what has happened. The scene is bewildering to watch: Sitting on the office couch in her bathing suit, having just returned from swimming in the sea by their house, Paiva’s hair is still dripping with saltwater when she finds out her life has been changed forever. But the audience doesn’t yet know why.
I’m Still Here takes place during the Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985, and the scene almost functions like an emotional map of the fallout of fascism in Brazil—confusion over absence of information, followed by the heaviness of grief. Rubens’s murder is only confirmed to the audience much later in the film, when his now-widow specifically asks what has happened to her husband’s body. This is when the still-hazy facts fall into place: Rubens was kidnapped and murdered by the Brazilian right-wing military dictatorship, and his family will never see him again.
I’m Still Here is based on a true story: Both in the movie and in reality, the Brazilian government wouldn’t admit to killing Rubens until 25 years after the fact. For much of the film, this unknowing leaves both Paiva and the audience on uncertain ground—how can we react to news we didn’t really hear? And how do we grieve for someone we don’t yet know is dead?
It’s not surprising that one of the most talked about performances from the Academy Awards this year is Fernanda Torres’s quiet portrayal of Eunice Paiva, for which she has been nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Yet the film’s impact is as much a credit to her performance as it is to the powerful true story behind it. The first Brazilian film to ever be nominated for Best Picture, I’m Still Here unveils a history that is often disputed or played down in both Brazil and the United States. It is a resurfacing of the prohibitive and visceral reality of living under the Brazilian military dictatorship: A “dissident” politician, Rubens Paiva was one of 434 people the regime kidnapped and murdered under the guise of stamping out communism and socialism, a move that was aided and abetted by the US during the Cold War. Rather than focus on his story, however, the film instead turns the lens on his wife, Eunice—one of the countless women and families those killings left behind. Through her perspective, there’s a surprising subtlety to I’m Still Here—and in its silences, there are embedded histories that the average non-Brazilian viewer might not be able to understand, but that give important context to the story being told.
At the end of March in 1964, the Brazilian military staged a coup d’etat in response to then-president João Goulart’s structural reforms, which sought to reduce class inequality through workers’ rights and agrarian reform. These changes were not well liked by Brazil’s elite, who, in particular, viewed the agrarian reform—which would see abandoned land redistributed to people without any—as prejudiced against owners of large swathes of land. The president’s relationship with unions and his support for the working class were also understood as the beginnings of communism in Brazil, rather than as an attempt to regulate workers’ rights in a country that was still operating under the same logics of the colonialism and slavery that founded it. The regime’s anti-communist position was an ideological win for the US, which resulted in the launching of Operation Brother Sam, a plan to logistically support the coup d’état should Goulart refuse to step down. After being forcibly ousted, Goulart was banned from running for political office for ten years and exiled to Uruguay with his family.
The violent stamping down of political dissent started early in the regime through heavy censorship of the media. The military controlled the newspapers, the radio broadcasts, and the TV news reels, only allowing positive news to be disseminated, and silencing any publications or people who had dissenting or critical opinions. Left-wing organizations and parties were dissolved and outlawed, often operating illegally to organize resistance against the government. These groups were also severely persecuted by the regime, including the Brazilian Workers’ Party, of which both Goulart and Rubens were members.
In I’m Still Here, the civilian struggle against this enforced silence is portrayed a few times, but perhaps most notably, when Eunice sends her oldest daughter Vera to London for an improvised gap year. Preemptively guarding against her daughter’s young sense of justice, Eunice does this to prevent Vera from joining the Students’ National Union out of fear for her safety. The organization operated illegally for 21 years throughout the dictatorship, and was key in organizing protests against the military government—but the consequences of getting involved in the resistance could be fatal. At least 39 students were murdered by the regime for organizing against them. Eunice knew that Vera, a young woman raised in a bohemian, left-wing household, would want to join the struggle against the dictatorship in college, and preferred to keep her safe in Europe until the regime subsided.
But even in London, the global consequences of the dictatorship were still evident. In a letter she sends home to her mother, Vera writes that she ran into Gilberto Gil, a Brazilian musician who was arrested without trial and detained for 57 days in 1968. After Gil was released, he was exiled from Brazil, and forced to leave the country alongside many other artists, including Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, and Raul Seixas. Yet despite the dictatorship’s mass censorship efforts, by the 1970s, music consumption had boomed in Brazil—and the regime aimed their attention at the genres of samba, rock, and MPB (Brazilian Popular Music), which had formed a broad front against the Christo-fascist repression of the dictatorship. It is estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 people were exiled from the country during this period, some of whom never returned. And it wasn’t just musicians: Many artists, intellectuals, journalists, filmmakers, and poets were also forced to leave, as a part of stamping out any voice that wasn’t favorable to the regime. The artists and musicians who were allowed to stay in Brazil had to submit their work to the government for approval before it was released, just to make sure the content wasn’t critical of the regime and that it promoted conservative, Christian values to the population. In I’m Still Here, the importance of Brazilian music during these dark times is displayed through the film’s soundtrack, which features some of the exiled artists, including Veloso and Gil.
The mass exile of musicians and artists is not uncommon in Latin American history—nor are state-sponsored disappearances and murders. Rubens’s disappearance and subsequent death in I’m Still Here is representative of what happened in Brazil, but the reality is that dictatorships across the continent have left thousands of families destroyed, forcing women to take up a fight they never signed up for and demand answers from their governments. In Chile, the Pinochet regime kidnapped and murdered 3,200 people, and to this day 1,500 of the disappeared have not been found. In Argentina, the government estimates 9,000 people were killed during the country’s dictatorship, while civilian groups claim the number of victims is 30,000. I’m Still Here portrays the case of Eunice, who, in addition to her grief, did not have access to her husband’s estate and bank accounts until the state finally issued a death certificate 25 years later. But it could just as easily have been about any one of the parents behind the Madres de La Plaza de Mayo, an organization in Argentina that, for 46 years, has fought to find disappeared students taken by the Argentine military regime in the 70s.
“The dictatorships of South America were not a banana republic matter,” Torres said in an interview with Vogue. “They were part of the macro politics of the time. That’s why I always repeat that [Eunice is] a victim of the Cold War; she’s not a victim of the dictatorship of a banana republic country. People treat the dictatorships in South America like something that happened on that faraway continent. But it’s all part of the same story.”
This same story continues to this day. But in exposing this complicated history of silence, I’m Still Here pushes for these silences to end contemporarily, challenging how right-wing politicians in Brazil and abroad regularly downplay the past dictatorship today in pursuit of their own political goals. If the dictatorship wasn’t that bad, they argue, then extreme-right president Jair Bolsonaro has done nothing wrong in attempting to stage a coup d’état against the newly elected left-wing president in 2022. But even the film’s Oscar campaign makes its intention explicit: to bring this history to a new audience, and to draw attention to the US’s involvement in deposing democratic regimes in Latin America in order to continuously exploit the continent for profit and labor. In the process, it has even strengthened the anti-amnesty campaign for the individuals who attempted to stage the coup in 2022.
In this sense, by telling Eunice and Rubens’s story, I’m Still Here has broken the silence that still persists, and that still helps to support fascist regimes across the globe. Despite the murders, the kidnappings, and the right-wing rewriting of history, the stories of the victims of these regimes, kept alive by the family who lost them, can never be killed. I’m Still Here is a testament to the power of political art and cinema—something the military regime wanted to exterminate at all costs. In a bid to truly commit to remembering history, I’m Still Here argues that a present-day consciousness of fascism is the only way to stop it.
