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\u2019s military dictatorship. His wife Eunice and 15-year-old daughter Eliana were also taken in for interrogation. They were released \u2014 Eunice after a full 12 days \u2014 but Rubens never returned home. It was only years later that Eunice \u2014 who studied to become a lawyer in her quest to establish the truth of her husband\u2019s fate \u2014 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\u2019s ordeal. Now a film based on that book and directed by Walter Salles, I\u2019m 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\u2019s 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\u2019m 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\u2019s 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\u201cShe cannot bury the body of her husband. This is very Antigone \u2014 but Antigone with five children [to support],\u201d Torres tells me when I meet her and Salles in London. \u201cEunice 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\u2019s money. They lost everything.\u201dSalles, 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\u2019s mother Fernanda Montenegro, who poignantly appears in the coda of I\u2019m 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. \u201cWhat triggered Marcelo\u2019s book was the fact that his mother was starting to lose her memory because she had Alzheimer\u2019s,\u201d he says. \u201cShe had fought all her life to collect memories of the family\u2019s journey, and there she was losing her memory at the same time as Brazil was trying to recover its memory.\u201dSalles 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\u2019s beachfront Leblon district, which was carefully recreated for the film. \u201cWe 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\u2019 house, there were no barriers to children discussing politics or discussing almost anything. When you\u2019re 13, that\u2019s something that sticks in your mind.\u201dWhat the Paiva home embodied for him, Salles says, \u201cwas the possibility of another country \u2014 a country that would be more inclusive, more creative, something that didn\u2019t exist any more in the dictatorship.\u201d For him, the family\u2019s openness and creativity embodied a national energy that was brutally quashed during those years. He cites architects such as Oscar Niemeyer and L\u00facio Costa, the radical filmmakers of the Cinema Novo, the artists and musicians involved with the tropic\u00e1lia movement \u2014 including singers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, both of whom were forced into exile. The US-backed military coup d\u2019\u00e9tat 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: \u201cThat flow of imposed migration and exile was constant in Brazil. It affected all branches of society.\u201dTorres, 59, recalls those years as an anxious period that weighed heavily on Brazil\u2019s creative community, to which her parents belonged as actors and theatre directors. \u201cI remember the fear of censorship. My father and mother would have whole plays censored one day before the opening.\u201d This mood, she says, affected the whole of society, and left a grim legacy. \u201cBrazil\u2019s violent police force was inherited from that period. I\u2019ve been afraid of the police all my life.\u201dShe first worked with Salles in 1995, appearing in his early film Foreign Land, co-directed by Daniela Thomas, a producer on I\u2019m 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. \u201cI felt I had sinned so much as a comic actress,\u201d she laughs, \u201cthat I thought Walter would never think about me to play Eunice.\u201dBut the role is a magnificent fit, the solemn composure of Torres\u2019s performance hinting at a fiercely contained intensity of rage and pain. Eunice, Salles remembers, \u201cwas someone who had a clear inner strength, who expressed herself with few words, but with a kind of corrosive humour.\u201d The Eunice we see in the film, he says, \u201chas 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.\u201dThat Salles\u2019s film was made at all is testament to the change in Brazilian cinema\u2019s fortunes since President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva was re-elected in 2023, following his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro\u2019s war on the country\u2019s cultural sector. Under Bolsonaro, Salles says, he would never have obtained authorisation to shoot in Rio. \u201cIn Brazilian cinema, there\u2019s rarely a decade in which there weren\u2019t years of forced silence \u2014 which doesn\u2019t mean that we know how to deal with it. Every time it defies you to try to find a way out.\u201dTorres stresses the relevance of I\u2019m Still Here to the present \u2014 not least because there is always the possibility of a return to an authoritarian government in Brazil. Indeed, shortly after the film\u2019s release in November, evidence emerged of a conspiracy to unseat Lula and restore Bolsonaro to power in 2022.\u201cI don\u2019t like it when we talk about the military dictatorship like it was a banana republic thing that happened in South America,\u201d Torres says. \u201cNo, it was something global. Eunice was a victim of the cold war, and now things are the same. It\u2019s not just something that\u2019s happening in Brazil, it\u2019s something that we\u2019re all dealing with. It\u2019s not something that\u2019s over.\u201dYet she feels that I\u2019m Still Here, as its title suggests, is also a celebration \u2014 of the Paiva family, their resilience and solidarity, an expression of hope for a more compassionate future: \u201cThis film is about resistance through affection.\u201dIn US cinemas from February 7 and UK cinemas\u2009from February 21Find out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s military dictatorship. His wife Eunice and 15-year-old daughter Eliana were also taken in for interrogation. They were released \u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":198042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-198041","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198041"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":198043,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198041\/revisions\/198043"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}