Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles, best known for the Berlinale winner Central Station and the Che Guevara film The Motorcycle Diaries, has again hit the bull’s eye with I’m Still Here. Based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s 2015 book Ainda Estou Aqui, I’m Still Here is a real-life account of the horrors faced by Marcelo’s family at the hands of the Brazilian military dictatorship in the early 70s.
It is centred on Marcelo’s mother Eunice Paiva who finds life for herself, and her five children, turning upside down when her husband and former Brazilian Labour Party congressman Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) goes missing.
A film in which the personal becomes the political, I’m Still Here is a cautionary tale on state persecution and violence, which more often than not offers no legal recourse to the affected. It has become the biggest Brazilian hit since COVID-19, despite calls for a boycott by the country’s far right.
The Brazilian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards, the film had its world premiere at Venice where it won Best Screenplay. It was recently featured in the Gala Screenings at the 21st Marrakech International Film Festival, where Salles interacted with the international press.
He spoke about adapting Marcelo’s book, how the film is breaking all the records at the Brazilian box office, his equation with lead actor Fernanda Torres, the return to the collective experience of watching a film and how the injustices of the military dictatorship of the 70s that the film deals with have not been addressed in the country to date.
Excerpts:
Why didn’t anything happen for the people that were killed (by the military dictatorship) at that time?
It’s because as opposed to what happened in Argentina and Chile, the crimes committed by the dictatorship in Brazil in the 70s were not punished. Nobody was imprisoned. A film that I love, Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985 is a story (about the trial of the members of the country’s military government) that could not be told in Brazil.
This is what is ultimately leading so many filmmakers to look at that period again, bringing up this question that you just did—why? It’s been asked many times, because we almost drifted again to an oppressive regime. Many documentaries have surfaced about the period, and some are truly excellent.
You have had a close relationship with the Paiva family. Did that get you interested? Is it like a personal film?
It is by far the most personal film I’ve developed. At the same time, it’s inspired by the book. It’s the blend of all the layers that Marcelo portrayed in his book and the glimpses of memory that I had of my own adolescence.
Fernanda Torres’ (who plays the mother) face is where your film truly resides. The impending doom seems to lurk in her expressions…
Marcelo’s book is ignited by the fact that his mother was starting to lose her memory while, in fact, all the rest of her life she had fought to establish and revive that memory (of the 70s), and not allow it to be forgotten. He wanted to somehow do justice to that. And, at the same time, he had his first child who was forming memories. As he was writing the book, he understood that she had been the silent, central figure of the family for 30-40 years. The book is written with such freedom and honesty that it led us to try and find the same qualities in the film. It’s told from the microcosm of family, but through her eyes. We know as much as she knows.
Did you deliberately cast a real-life daughter and mother—Fernanda Torres and Fernanda Montenegro—to play the younger and older versions, respectively?
I have had the good luck of collaborating with both of them in previous works. I consider Fernanda Torres a co-author of the film in her own right. She has the craft and the emotional intelligence to portray a woman who is extremely restrained but has a unique inner strength. Like a volcano that never spills and yet there’s always something brewing inside. It was about trying to say a lot with very little.
What was your approach to shooting the darker torture scenes?
Here you had to create the layers to understand the enormity of the violence through the mother’s eyes and the perception that she has. The prison was completely nightmarish for her, and what she was hearing was probably the same forms of torture that led to her husband’s death, which she is not aware of while she is there. Yet, you know. In cinema, many times what you don’t see, but can sense or kind of foresee, becomes extremely powerful. It gives a kind of Kafkian reality to it.
The film is doing extraordinarily well in Brazil. It’s gotten the best admissions in the post-COVID era. But there’s been some pushback from right-wing associations…
Those (pushback attempts) are not working very well. What is happening in Brazil that is truly interesting is the possibility of returning to the collectiveness of cinema. For four years, because of the pandemic and the regime that we had, people ceased to go to the cinema to see their own reflection. But that’s something that is a need that we carry within, and therefore this film lent itself to this kind of collective experience. We never thought that it would generate as much audience, and as rapidly as it has, but it shows how much you need to see your own reflection on the large screen and how certain films need to be experienced collectively and not on the small screen.
But beyond what it means for cinema and the collective experience of viewing a film, the injustice itself was never addressed?
Many people are writing about this. Every single day in the papers, there’s somebody asking to revise this. That’s one of the effects that it is having in Brazil right now. And in this sense, it’s interesting that the film somehow transcended the realm of cinema, and is also being commented on, discussed in the societal or political areas of debate.
Is cinema still a place where people can provoke change and raise questions?
I think that we are in an age of numbness, but also one where people have the courage to name, on their own social media, the alternative truth. So cinema, literature and music are still really potent instruments to ask uncomfortable questions and relay forms of emotions that can somehow alter this sense of numbness. When I’m a little bit depressed about the state of the world, I remember that after the Middle Ages came the Renaissance.
You have said that you came into cinema for a sense of belonging. What about the association with the Paiva family?
There were many things I have learnt from cinema and the Paiva family. I was 13 when I met them. The way they exercised free speech in that house, the way nothing was really forbidden, the way you were asked to actually be part of the conversation, unlike how it was in my house where there was a kind of barrier between generations. I felt invited to be part of that family. I tried to extend that invitation in doing the film and in actually putting the family together and preparing the actors. I tried to be faithful to the memory I had of that family.
To come back to your first question, it’s true that we’re coming from a phase where a more cynical perception of characters is really the norm, but I’m more interested in another form of cinema.