When Walter Salles first read the novel “I’m Still Here,” written by his childhood friend Marcelo Rubens Paiva, it took him back to his adolescence. A time when Brazil hadn’t completely lost its innocence. In 1969, after spending five years abroad, Salles and his family returned to Rio de Janeiro. Then 13, he became friends with the Paiva family’s five children. And although the country was under military dictatorship, the Paiva home, in walking distance of a paradisiacal beach, was something of a sanctuary.
“We all gravitated to that house because it was the reverse angle of what was happening in Brazil at that time,” Salles recalls. “There was free speech; we could talk about absolutely everything. Music that was censored on the radio was playing all the time on their record player. You could enter a political discussion with the parents, and then you could talk about music and whatever was happening at that time — a fascinating time because the world was being redefined at that point, and Brazil was in the opposite direction. So, somehow that house and that family was a microcosm of a country we all kind of wanted to live in.”
As depicted in Salles’ eventual film of the same title, the patriarch of the family, former Congressman Rubens Paiva, was arrested and taken in for questioning on Jan. 20, 1971. He was never seen alive again. It took his wife, Eunice Paiva, primarily portrayed by Fernanda Torres in the film, more than two decades to have his death officially recognized by a Brazilian government intent on moving forward.
“As we were developing [the movie], the zeitgeist changed completely, and we were faced with the rise of the extreme right-wing in Brazil,” Salles says. “And their discourse was, ‘Let’s go back to a wonderful time of the military dictatorship.’ And there we were suddenly realizing that we were making, yes, a film about our past, but at the same time we were making a film about the present — what we were experiencing in every discussion on every street corner.”
It took Salles and his creative partners seven years and at least 28 versions of the script before they were confident to begin production. The film eventually premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and was selected as Brazil’s international feature Oscar submission. Salles immediately informs the viewer of the political context of the story: The menacing threat of the authoritarian regime is there in the very first image, a shot of a woman, Eunice Paiva, swimming in the ocean.
“It could be paradise, but then there’s a military helicopter flying over her, and that helicopter is menacingly low, and it shouldn’t be,” Salles says. “So, there’s something from the very beginning that is kind of destabilizing and that somehow echoes through the first 30 minutes of the film here and there. That scene for us was always a little equivalent of a Greek omen at the beginning of an Aeschylus tragedy. The birds, the vultures are circling.”
Fernanda Torres stars in “I’m Still Here,” based on a the story of a Brazilian family that director Walter Salles knew growing up.
(Alile Onawale/Sony Pictures Classics)
Salles lost touch with the Paivas after they left Rio in the early 1970s. Marcello’s novel triggered a desire for Salles to revisit that era — in this case, with the story of a broken family and a matriarch who had to reinvent herself to give her children any sort of future. The filmmaker calls it a “microcosm of humanity during a time of turmoil.” And, along with his celebrated films such as “Central Station” and “The Motorcycle Diaries,” it was another opportunity to share the collective journey of a country through the individual stories of its people.
“I didn’t know all the layers of the story, and I didn’t know the extent to which this woman had managed to reinvent herself, had somehow found manners to erode an autocratic government using very specific weapons,” Salles says. “So, the book was fundamental in allowing me in. And then the whole family was very supportive during those years and sent so much information, so many photographs. And this is what allowed me metaphorically to reopen that house. I felt invited to reopen that house.”
Along with screenwriters Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, Salles embraced the fact that Eunice Paiva was a woman full of steely resolve but also internal contradictions. She never allowed herself or her family to be photographed by the government without a smile. She never allowed the government or the press to see her children crying.
“This is a woman who was fueled by extraordinary inner strength, who also could say words that were very poignant and, at the same time, appear to be restrained,” Salles notes. “She’s like a volcano that is always near eruption but actually does not erupt. There’s always something bubbling inside of her that she somehow restrained. There’s something really extraordinary and heroic in her confrontation with that regime. But on the other hand, it was so tough for her kids to actually have a mother who never truly shared what happened to their father. She never articulated that in a clear manner, thus depriving them of the possibility to get to closure on that.
“As Fernanda Torres says, ‘In tragedy, you don’t cry; you have to confront, you take in and then you react.’ And this is what she did. And with an extraordinary inner strength, but a great ambivalence as well.”