I'm Still Here (2024)

All I Have is a Photograph (And I Realize...)
or

"Hey, Hey, Dee Dee, Take Me Back to Piaui"

 

Rubens Paiva was taken from his home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by armed men on January 20, 1971 for questioning about seditionists to the military dictatorship in power at the time and about a recent spate of kidnap cases involving foreign ambassadors to Brazil, including the representatives from the U.S., West Germany and Switzerland.

 

He never came home.

 

In fact, despite his car being found at a prison facility run by the military, there was no sign that he had ever been taken there, and officials denied he was in custody. It was like he never existed. Except that he left behind a wife and five children, one of whom, Marcelo, grew up to write about the incident in his 2015 book "Ainda Estou Aqui". 

That translates to I'm Still Here, and Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles—he made On the Road—has made a film of it, to put a face on one of the people "disappeared" due to governmental malfeasance throughout the world. The Paiva story is just one of thousands; there were 434 such "disappearances" during Brazil's military dictatorship alone.

Salles doesn't sensationalize things. He starts with family activities, the kids interacting on the beach not far from their back door, playing volleyball, finding a stray puppy, while mother Eunice—her full name is Maria Lucrécia Eunice Facciolla Paiva—(Fernanda Torres) floats in the ocean, peaceful and calm, when a military helicopter passes not far overhead interrupting the tranquility. Salles cuts between his footage and recreated 16mm "home movies" that the kids make to document their lives, serving as the movie's "B"-roll. They'll become important later. 

It's every day life. Parties, new dog, music, dancing. But, there's an under-current of politics. The party is for daughter Vera who's going off to London for school, partly because she has friends with leftist leanings who are being tracked by the government. Dad Ruben has returned from his own self-imposed exile after some months as a liberal councilman put him on the military's radar. But the ambassadorial kidnappings have intensified the military's presence in the streets and the father is keeping close contact with his friends in the Brazilian Labor Party. It's only a matter of time before that presence arrives at their door-step.

When it does, it comes quietly but assertively. Men in plain clothes and suspicious looks show up one day, armed, while the family is going on about their normal lives. But, the normalcy ends immediately. Ruben drives off in his car with a couple of the guys to be taken in for questioning. The family, particularly Eunice, take a "wait and see" attitude. But, then Eunice and her next eldest daughter Eliana are driven to one of the military prisons for their own questioning. Eunice will stay there for twelve days; Eliana just one. No mention is made of the whereabouts of her husband, and eventually all information about him dries up, and the military denies they have them. Then why is his car still in their lot?

I'm Still Here tracks the family's progress and the stoic Eunice's change from victim to activist and her quest for answers about what happened to her husband. It will take decades of effort as she also raises her children, but always keeping an eye on that empty chair at the dinner table. With her stores of pictures and films she has the evidence that her husband existed, while the government continues to deny his existence or their part in his disappearance. She will fight until she gets the one piece of paper that will expose the whole thing—his death certificate.

It's an amazing movie, much more so for the fact that it seems so ordinary, so focused as it is with the mere act of surviving a trauma, and building a family out of tragedy. Despite the hopelessness of the circumstances, the movie comes out filled with hope.