Fernanda Torres as Eunice in I’m Still Here | Image: Adrian Teijido / Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Put on earrings. Go out for ice cream. Swim. Expose the conditions of torture. For Eunice Paiva, the protagonist of 2024 Brazilian film I’m Still Here, the fight against dictatorship has a rhythm. After being interrogated about her association with communists and terrorists, she must now try to find out where her husband is detained and work with a lawyer to get him out. She also has five children, whose ages range from 7 to 17, to care for. Her story and the delicate balance she maintains between these responsibilities has lessons for those of us unsure about how to act and feel amidst political uncertainty.
I’m Still Here, directed by Walter Salles, is a biographical drama based on the memoir of the real-life Eunice’s son Marcelo Rubens Paiva, whose book chronicles the arrest of his father, former Brazilian Labor Party congressman Rubens Beyrodt Paiva, and the effect his disappearance had on their family, particularly Eunice (played in the film by Fernanda Torres and Fernanda Montenegro). At various times during the day, the week, the year, Eunice must give all her steely attention to the seemingly futile task of getting information from the military dictatorship on her husband’s whereabouts—and later, quietly grieve his death—without forgetting that there is life teeming around her. In those moments of ordinary life, she does not lose sight of the fact that celebrating birthdays, playing soccer, and laughing are also part of the reality of the present—and will only be current now. In a telling scene in I’m Still Here, a newspaper covering her husband’s disappearance sends a photographer to take a picture of the family outside their stately home. The photographer instructs the group to be serious and perhaps a little sad, given the topic of the article. But why should they act like that, Eunice wonders, when they are giggling and having fun right now? “Smile,” she tells her children.
This is not to say that there is not a price to pay for maintaining a sharp separation between the two spheres of her reality. Eunice is exhausted, and occasionally loses her temper with her children. Sometimes she makes mistakes. When her daughter living in London writes to ask for more news of her father, Eunice doesn’t tell her other children about this part of their communication; when another daughter discovers the letter, the siblings receive their mother’s omission as yet another lie within a society marked by lies. For all of her ability to control the environment of her family to the best she is able, Eunice cannot truly know how the values of a regime that keeps so much hidden have seeped into her own consciousness.
The film also captures the myopia that can set in for those crusading for justice during times of autocratic rule. A teacher at the children’s school had been imprisoned at the same time as Rubens, and in an attempt to counter the government’s denial of her husband’s arrest, Eunice tries to convince the teacher to be an eyewitness in her legal case against the state. In her determination, Eunice misses how scared the teacher is about what could still happen to her own family. No one can fault Eunice for her focus on her husband’s detention, but it has become difficult for her to recognize the same urgency in other people’s stories.
Still, 25 years later, she is again smiling during a press conference after she receives the official death certificate for her husband. While no one has been charged with the extrajudicial killing, she still feels relief when there is an official record and an opportunity to remember. Just like the array of family photos that stitch together the film, the death certificate is another fragment that documents the full reality of lives lived. As catastrophic as political events are, they exist alongside countless other events. The film is full of people taking photographs and making home movies recording everyday life. And shot on 16 mm and 35 mm itself, I’m Still Here offers its own kind of tangible testimony. These artifacts seem to say, “We had full lives. We loved each other the best we were able. We even felt joy.”
To say that the fight has a rhythm is to say that the work of political engagement—voting, protesting in the streets, tracking every missed payment, pursuing lawsuits, or a hundred other tasks—requires fortitude, resourcefulness, and clarity of purpose. It is also to say that while this kind of work is necessary to preserve democracy, it must not eclipse the range of human experiences with which it coexists. We cannot allow political work, and the fear, anger, and despair that accompany that work, to take up more than its share of time and space. We must acknowledge both spheres of our existence. The fight has a rhythm.
