Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic On January 20 1971, Brazilian civil engineer and former congressman Rubens Paiva was arrested at his Rio de Janeiro home by officials of the country’s military dictatorship. His wife Eunice and 15-year-old daughter Eliana were also taken in for interrogation. They were released — Eunice after a full 12 days — but Rubens never returned home. It was only years later that Eunice — who studied to become a lawyer in her quest to establish the truth of her husband’s fate — learnt the facts around his death.In 2014, the National Truth Commission confirmed that Rubens had been murdered by the regime. The following year, his story became more widely known when his son Marcelo Rubens Paiva, aged 10 when his father disappeared, wrote a memoir addressing the family’s ordeal. Now a film based on that book and directed by Walter Salles, I’m Still Here, is set for international success. It has been nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best International Feature Film and Best Actress for Fernanda Torres, who won Best Female Actor in a Film (Drama) at last month’s Golden Globes for her portrayal of Eunice. The film is already a massive success in Brazil, where it has attracted more than 3mn cinemagoers and sparked fresh debate on a painful chapter in the national history. A long-established star of Brazilian stage and screen, Torres sees I’m Still Here as bringing overdue recognition to its heroine. Eunice Paiva died in 2018 aged 89, having been a human rights lawyer and a committed ally of Brazil’s indigenous communities.Eunice resisted through her intelligence. She went back to university with five children and no money, and became a lawyer and fought for justice“She cannot bury the body of her husband. This is very Antigone — but Antigone with five children [to support],” Torres tells me when I meet her and Salles in London. “Eunice resisted through her intelligence. She went back to university with five children and no money, and became a lawyer and fought for justice. It took 25 years to get a death certificate [for Rubens], and this was not just a piece of paper. Without it, Eunice could not have access to the family’s money. They lost everything.”Salles, 68, is known for international projects including Che Guevara biopic The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and Jack Kerouac adaptation On the Road (2012), but he previously helped put Brazilian cinema back on the world map in 1998 with his Oscar-nominated Central Station. That starred another eminence of national film and theatre: Torres’s mother Fernanda Montenegro, who poignantly appears in the coda of I’m Still Here as Eunice towards the end of her life.The director sees his film as underscored by a poignant irony in terms of its mission to cast light on the past. “What triggered Marcelo’s book was the fact that his mother was starting to lose her memory because she had Alzheimer’s,” he says. “She had fought all her life to collect memories of the family’s journey, and there she was losing her memory at the same time as Brazil was trying to recover its memory.”Salles knew the Paivas as an adolescent in the late 1960s through a girlfriend who was close to one of the four daughters. He was a frequent visitor to their house in Rio’s beachfront Leblon district, which was carefully recreated for the film. “We tried to find the spirit of the original house, the spirit of that family, its vividness, the fact that you walked in and you would see different tribes: each of the five Paiva kids had friends, and they all merged in that house. Contrary to my parents’ house, there were no barriers to children discussing politics or discussing almost anything. When you’re 13, that’s something that sticks in your mind.”What the Paiva home embodied for him, Salles says, “was the possibility of another country — a country that would be more inclusive, more creative, something that didn’t exist any more in the dictatorship.” For him, the family’s openness and creativity embodied a national energy that was brutally quashed during those years. He cites architects such as Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, the radical filmmakers of the Cinema Novo, the artists and musicians involved with the tropicália movement — including singers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, both of whom were forced into exile. The US-backed military coup d’état happened in 1964, at the height of cold war anxiety about socialist tendencies in South America. Military rule lasted until 1985. Throughout that period, says Salles: “That flow of imposed migration and exile was constant in Brazil. It affected all branches of society.”Torres, 59, recalls those years as an anxious period that weighed heavily on Brazil’s creative community, to which her parents belonged as actors and theatre directors. “I remember the fear of censorship. My father and mother would have whole plays censored one day before the opening.” This mood, she says, affected the whole of society, and left a grim legacy. “Brazil’s violent police force was inherited from that period. I’ve been afraid of the police all my life.”She first worked with Salles in 1995, appearing in his early film Foreign Land, co-directed by Daniela Thomas, a producer on I’m Still Here. Since then, in parallel with her dramatic work, Torres has become popular in Brazil as a comedy star on stage and in sitcoms. “I felt I had sinned so much as a comic actress,” she laughs, “that I thought Walter would never think about me to play Eunice.”But the role is a magnificent fit, the solemn composure of Torres’s performance hinting at a fiercely contained intensity of rage and pain. Eunice, Salles remembers, “was someone who had a clear inner strength, who expressed herself with few words, but with a kind of corrosive humour.” The Eunice we see in the film, he says, “has a character that never explodes, but is always brewing, constantly in internal motion. Only an actress like Fernanda could actually grab that. It was about working with minimal gestures that could express the magnitude of what Eunice was feeling, or omitting. Because she omits from the children what she knows, as a form of protection. She never allowed herself to be seen as a victim by the government, or by her children. She never cried in front of them.”That Salles’s film was made at all is testament to the change in Brazilian cinema’s fortunes since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was re-elected in 2023, following his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro’s war on the country’s cultural sector. Under Bolsonaro, Salles says, he would never have obtained authorisation to shoot in Rio. “In Brazilian cinema, there’s rarely a decade in which there weren’t years of forced silence — which doesn’t mean that we know how to deal with it. Every time it defies you to try to find a way out.”Torres stresses the relevance of I’m Still Here to the present — not least because there is always the possibility of a return to an authoritarian government in Brazil. Indeed, shortly after the film’s release in November, evidence emerged of a conspiracy to unseat Lula and restore Bolsonaro to power in 2022.“I don’t like it when we talk about the military dictatorship like it was a banana republic thing that happened in South America,” Torres says. “No, it was something global. Eunice was a victim of the cold war, and now things are the same. It’s not just something that’s happening in Brazil, it’s something that we’re all dealing with. It’s not something that’s over.”Yet she feels that I’m Still Here, as its title suggests, is also a celebration — of the Paiva family, their resilience and solidarity, an expression of hope for a more compassionate future: “This film is about resistance through affection.”In US cinemas from February 7 and UK cinemas from February 21Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
