Film of the Week: ‘Ainda Estou Aqui’ (‘I’m Still Here’)

After a 12-year absence from the big screen and for his first Brazil-set feature since Linha De Passe in 2008, celebrated Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries) returns with a fact-based story of resistance and loss, set against a dark chapter in Brazil’s history.

Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here) follows Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), a housewife who is forced to reinvent herself as an activist when her husband and ex-congressman Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) becomes a desaparecido – one of the many who were taken into custody, interrogated, tortured and never heard from again during military-ruled Brazil in the 70s.

Faced with the authorities’ denial he was ever arrested in the first place, she relentlessly pursues the truth behind her husband’s forced disappearance while trying to keep her family of five together.

Based on the memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the son of Rubens and Eunice, this no-frills drama is gripping and never topples into melodrama. By telling the story from the perspective of those left behind, Salles crafts a moving film that sets itself apart from other narratives that tend to treat the subject matter via procedural reenactments. The director manages to bottle up a palpable sense of anxiety throughout – and not just when it comes to the central abduction scene, which borders on home invasion horror. He plunges the audience into the insidious nature of institutionalised kidnappings and inside a monstrous machinery where cruelty becomes casual.

However, I’m Still Here‘s greatest achievement is the way he keeps things personal.

Central to this is Fernanda Torres, who is sublime in the way she portrays strength in the most empathetic of ways. Her layered performance keeps you hooked to Eunice’s terrifying ordeal, one in which fear, grief and hope are mercilessly intertwined. Salles knows to keep Torres front and centre but manages to create a space in which the audience can take a step back and register the wider and cruel implications of state-sanctioned abductions. It’s in that same space that the true theme of the film resonates: resilience in the face of injustice.

I’m Still Here may be an affecting tribute to a remarkable woman, but it is first and foremost a depressingly timely reminder. As seen in the film’s closing act, the effects of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for more than two decades are still felt today. It has become a long-neglected trauma, one exploited by Jair Bolsonaro, who has long praised dictatorship-era torturers. His vampiric spectre and the rise of the far-right looms over the film, and with it comes the fear that remembrance is under attack.

Past trauma can be confronted but the warning signs belong to the present, and those willing to forget end up endorsing history’s crimes. Memory becomes the ultimate act of resistance. Pervert it, destroy it or simply fail to recall it, and the past’s mistakes are doomed to be repeated.

Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here) premiered at 2024’s Venice Film Festival. It has been released in Brazil and begins its European rollout this month. The Golden Globes 2025 take place this Sunday.