The True Story Behind I’m Still Here, the Oscar Contender Pushing Brazil to Confront Its Dark Past

When the celebrated Brazilian author Marcelo Paiva started writing his 2015 memoir Ainda Eustou Aqui (I’m Still Here), he wanted to record his family history as his mother, Eunice Paiva, started losing her memory. Eunice was in her eighties and had been living with Alzheimer’s for over a decade—causing her to forget her past as an influential human rights lawyer and activist in Brazil. Much of her work had been devoted to indigenous rights, but her lifelong pursuit of justice was personal: her former husband and Marcelo’s father, Rubens Paiva, an engineer and former congressman, was arrested by military police and forcibly disappeared on Jan. 20, 1971. It became clear only decades later that Rubens was tortured and murdered by Brazil’s military dictatorship, which ruled from 1964 to 1985. His body was never found.

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Through this family lens, Marcelo Paiva’s story also took on a greater meaning regarding Brazil’s dark—and largely unspoken—past. The book was a domestic best-seller, but now, the Paivas’ family story has gone global with the critically acclaimed film I’m Still Here. Releasing in the U.S. on Jan. 17 after premiering to raves and a Best Screenplay award at the Venice International Film Festival, the movie was adapted from Marcelo’s book by his friend Walter Salles, one of Brazil’s most accomplished filmmakers, known for City of God, The Motorcycle Diaries, and On the Road.

Salles’ first Brazilian feature film in 16 years and first feature in over a decade, I’m Still Here has fought its way into the conversation this awards season. On Jan. 5, it won one of the two Golden Globes for which it was nominated, Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama for star Fernanda Torres. She beat Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie, and Kate Winslet to become the first Brazilian actress to win this award, 25 years after her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who plays an older version of Eunice in I’m Still Here, was nominated in this category for another Salles film, Central Station. It is widely predicted that I’m Still Here will be nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards. Now, Torres is in a front-row seat to earn a Best Actress nomination too.

The film portrays the Paivas’ idyllic family life by Ipanema beach in Rio de Janeiro in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, while, in the background, military police cracks down on leftist guerilla groups resisting the dictatorship. The family’s joy is brutally interrupted by Rubens’ home arrest by the military in 1971. Eunice (Torres) and one of her four daughters are then arrested and interrogated in prison. After their release, and throughout Rubens’ continued disappearance, Eunice begins a decades-long fight for the truth about what happened to him. The film eventually jumps to 1996, when she finally receives his death certificate, and then to 2014, when the 85-year-old Eunice only fleetingly remembers her past.

As of late December, over 3 million people had gone to see I’m Still Here in Brazilian cinemas, generating $11 million domestically, and making it Salles’ most successful film there after a three-decade long career. As the film’s popularity grows in Brazil, more and more people are reckoning with the country’s brutal history, and seeing parallels with the far-right there today. Crucially, the book and film’s releases coincided with major events in Brazil connected to the true story of the Paivas, providing a sense of urgency and a case of life reflecting art.

A film about Brazil’s past—and present

As Marcelo Paiva was writing his book, the National Truth Commission (Comissão Nacional da Verdade) was launched in Brazil by former president Dilma Roussef—who had herself been jailed and tortured during military rule—to investigate crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship. It was thanks to that report, published in 2014, that Rubens Paiva was confirmed as one of 434 people killed or disappeared by the military regime, while tens of thousands more were tortured.

“I realized that my mother was losing her memory while Brazil was discussing its own memory,” Paiva told TIME. “It was a very weird parallel and paradox to write about.”

This past fall, the film’s release in early November in Brazil came a few weeks before a police report rocked Brazilian politics. It revealed that military allies of Brazilian far-right politician and former president Jair Bolsonaro—many of whom were part of the dictatorship and never faced accountability—were planning a coup against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva after Bolsonaro lost the election in 2022. This attempted military coup involved a shocking plan to kill Lula, his Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin, and a Supreme Court Justice.

Read more: What Brazil’s Failed Coup Means for the Future of Its Democracy

“At the beginning of this journey, I thought that we were going to offer a reflection of the past to better understand where we’re at,” Walter Salles told TIME, “but little by little, as the zeitgeist in Brazil changed and the far-right acquired an important presence that we didn’t anticipate, it soon became clear that the film was also about the present.”

Torres agrees: “We were on the edge of something done by people who admired the dictatorship from the ‘70s. And there was a problem with remembering… not only in Brazil, but in the world. [Many people thought] that the dictatorship was not so bad, that torture perhaps didn’t exist, that the problem is democracy.” The news of this attempted coup was, for her, “a mirror image of what that [Paiva] family faced.”

A major reason why she, Salles, and others who worked on the film felt this mirror-effect is because Bolsonaro is a passionate supporter of Brazil’s military dictatorship, calling the military coup in 1964 “Liberty Day.” Most of his supporters follow his fondness for that period. Around 58 million Brazilians voted for Bolsonaro in the 2018 elections, over 55% of votes, and though he lost to Lula in 2022, his supporters staged a massive anti-democratic attack on the Brazilian congress in 2023, drawing obvious parallels with the Capitol attack by Trump supporters in 2021.

Honoring the legacy of a widow turned national hero

This political context was felt in the room when I’m Still Here began production in 2023, but Salles said it became a source of motivation: “We collectively understood what was at stake while we were shooting it, which helped bring us focus and make the exact same film, which is something fundamental in cinema.”

Torres invoked the concept of “o homem cordial” (“the cordial man”), coined by Brazilian sociologist Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, as a key way of understanding Brazilian identity and how Brazilians tend to deal with serious issues.

“We [Brazilians] are very friendly. We are very open. We are very familiar. On the other hand, we tend to solve our state problems, political problems, in a private way… We put things under the carpet.” 

Despite attempts by the Brazilian far-right to boycott the film, it became a national phenomenon. This took Torres by surprise, as she expected a film about Rubens Paiva, a symbol of the crimes committed by the military, to be attacked even beyond those furthest to the right. “Everybody got affected and touched by this [Paiva] family… the right-wing, left-wing, the center, so we were not attacked.”

Brazilian historian Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, who was himself imprisoned in Brasilia during the dictatorship and met Rubens and Eunice Paiva in his youth, said that much of the film’s popularity is owed to its focus on an affluent family in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s, and its synchronicity with current events.

He told TIME that films about the military dictatorship used to be “militant films about urban guerrilla warfare, and militants ready to kill and die. Now we see a very happy family of the Brazilian haute-bourgeoisie, not involved in subversive actions, that is struck by this bolt of lightning falling on their house, and it coincides with the discovery that there was a plan to kill Lula by people in Bolsonaro’s entourage.”

The historian said that the film has struck Brazilian youth so much that on YouTube and TikTok there are “daughters of former political prisoners making videos showing photos and telling their family stories”—something unthinkable for older generations of Brazilians. This viral effect is not only online: In São Paulo, where Eunice Paiva, who died in 2018 at 89, is buried, her tomb has reportedly become a pilgrimage site for admirers of this woman who fought for Brazil’s democracy.

“My mother transgressed the stereotype of a widow into a hero, and built a new personality, a new persona as a lawyer,” says Marcelo Paiva. The acclaimed Brazilian writer is the only son of the five children Eunice raised alone after Rubens disappeared, while she became a human rights lawyer. The family lived in a big house in Leblon in Rio when Rubens was around, but were forced to move after his enforced disappearance. Since his death was not made official until 1996—25 years later—Eunice couldn’t access his bank accounts or sell his belongings to support her family. The whole cast and crew were in awe of Eunice’s life. For Torres, the goal was to make “a movie that she would be proud of.”

The thin line between dictatorship and democracy

I’m Still Here is split between a beautiful innocence in Rio and a suspended grief following Rubens’ disappearance. Salles was childhood friends with the Paiva children, and remembers spending time with them in the late ‘60s in their “very luminous” house by the beach, where “the windows and doors were constantly open, the political discussion was free and the music was constant… In that house pulsated the dream of another country, which was really different from the reality of Brazil at that point, because the country was under military dictatorship and censorship, and the military was so present in everyday life.”

Decades later, although Brazil has changed significantly and returned to its democratic roots, many still feel that this “dream of another country” Salles speaks of remains distant as political parallels between then and now continue. “Both in Brazil and in the U.S., there is a very thin line between a dictatorship and a democracy,” Marcelo Paiva said. “Fortunately, we resisted, but I don’t know for how long. But the movie is important to create a sense of responsibility for the population about the future.”

Can a film help a country confront its dark past? Probably not fully, but Salles certainly believes that culture can play a role in this discussion. “There’s a vitality to Brazilian cinema and art in general that is triggered by the desire to offer a reflection of our own identity, and this film is part of this larger picture,” he said. “It’s not standing alone.”