When Walter Salles first learn the novel “I’m Still Here,” written by his childhood buddy Marcelo Rubens Paiva, it took him again to his adolescence. A time when Brazil hadn’t fully misplaced its innocence. In 1969, after spending 5 years overseas, Salles and his household returned to Rio de Janeiro. Then 13, he turned associates with the Paiva household’s 5 kids. And though the nation was below army dictatorship, the Paiva house, in strolling distance of a paradisiacal seaside, was one thing of a sanctuary.
“We all gravitated to that house because it was the reverse angle of what was happening in Brazil at that time,” Salles remembers. “There was free speech; we could talk about absolutely everything. Music that was censored on the radio was playing all the time on their record player. You could enter a political discussion with the parents, and then you could talk about music and whatever was happening at that time — a fascinating time because the world was being redefined at that point, and Brazil was in the opposite direction. So, somehow that house and that family was a microcosm of a country we all kind of wanted to live in.”
As depicted in Salles’ eventual movie of the identical title, the patriarch of the household, former Congressman Rubens Paiva, was arrested and brought in for questioning on Jan. 20, 1971. He was by no means seen alive once more. It took his spouse, Eunice Paiva, primarily portrayed by Fernanda Torres within the movie, greater than twenty years to have his demise formally acknowledged by a Brazilian authorities intent on shifting ahead.
“As we were developing [the movie], the zeitgeist changed completely, and we were faced with the rise of the extreme right-wing in Brazil,” Salles says. “And their discourse was, ‘Let’s go back to a wonderful time of the military dictatorship.’ And there we were suddenly realizing that we were making, yes, a film about our past, but at the same time we were making a film about the present — what we were experiencing in every discussion on every street corner.”
It took Salles and his inventive companions seven years and at the very least 28 variations of the script earlier than they have been assured to start manufacturing. The movie ultimately premiered on the 2024 Venice Movie Competition and was chosen as Brazil’s worldwide characteristic Oscar submission. Salles instantly informs the viewer of the political context of the story: The menacing menace of the authoritarian regime is there within the very first picture, a shot of a girl, Eunice Paiva, swimming within the ocean.
“It could be paradise, but then there’s a military helicopter flying over her, and that helicopter is menacingly low, and it shouldn’t be,” Salles says. “So, there’s something from the very beginning that is kind of destabilizing and that somehow echoes through the first 30 minutes of the film here and there. That scene for us was always a little equivalent of a Greek omen at the beginning of an Aeschylus tragedy. The birds, the vultures are circling.”
Fernanda Torres stars in “I’m Still Here,” based mostly on a the story of a Brazilian household that director Walter Salles knew rising up.
(Alile Onawale/Sony Photos Classics)
Salles misplaced contact with the Paivas after they left Rio within the early Seventies. Marcello’s novel triggered a want for Salles to revisit that period — on this case, with the story of a damaged household and a matriarch who needed to reinvent herself to offer her kids any form of future. The filmmaker calls it a “microcosm of humanity during a time of turmoil.” And, alongside together with his celebrated movies similar to “Central Station” and “The Motorcycle Diaries,” it was one other alternative to share the collective journey of a rustic by means of the person tales of its folks.
“I didn’t know all the layers of the story, and I didn’t know the extent to which this woman had managed to reinvent herself, had somehow found manners to erode an autocratic government using very specific weapons,” Salles says. “So, the book was fundamental in allowing me in. And then the whole family was very supportive during those years and sent so much information, so many photographs. And this is what allowed me metaphorically to reopen that house. I felt invited to reopen that house.”
Together with screenwriters Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, Salles embraced the truth that Eunice Paiva was a girl filled with steely resolve but additionally inner contradictions. She by no means allowed herself or her household to be photographed by the federal government with no smile. She by no means allowed the federal government or the press to see her kids crying.
“This is a woman who was fueled by extraordinary inner strength, who also could say words that were very poignant and, at the same time, appear to be restrained,” Salles notes. “She’s like a volcano that is always near eruption but actually does not erupt. There’s always something bubbling inside of her that she somehow restrained. There’s something really extraordinary and heroic in her confrontation with that regime. But on the other hand, it was so tough for her kids to actually have a mother who never truly shared what happened to their father. She never articulated that in a clear manner, thus depriving them of the possibility to get to closure on that.
“As Fernanda Torres says, ‘In tragedy, you don’t cry; you have to confront, you take in and then you react.’ And this is what she did. And with an extraordinary inner strength, but a great ambivalence as well.”
