A powerful film that revisits the story of a family and a nation, Brazil, to tell of the human rights violation of a dictatorial political regime. Winner of the 2025 Oscar for Best International Feature Film, the story is told from the point of view of Eunice, the wife of the desaparecido (disappeared person), Rubens Paiva.

I’m Still Here is a film about human rights. It is a film about people denied and trampled over, and the impact of this violation on ordinary people. People in love, people sentimentally, emotionally connected to a person who, in an extremely violent way, has been deprived of the most fundamental of all human rights: life.

It is a work about the memory of the brutality brought about by the military dictatorship in Brazil during the sixties, seventies, and eighties. This great film, by Brazilian Walter Salles, won the 2025 Oscar for Best International Feature Film.

Through this painful moment in history, the film denounces dictatorships across time and place. It denounces those regimes that deprive people of their freedoms: freedom of expression, political freedom, artistic freedom, emotional freedom.

These dictatorships deny human nature itself, bringing suffering, injustice, an absence of dialogue, and death.

I’m Still Here tells the true story of Rubens Paiva, a Brazilian engineer and Labour deputy during the political scene of 1964, who was captured over the Christmas period of 1970 in Rio de Janeiro. Paiva was taken from his home, right in front of his wife, Eunice Paiva, who was masterfully portrayed by Fernanda Torres (a performance that won the actor a Golden Globe).

The mother of five children, she becomes the protagonist of this touching work taken from the book of the same name by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, one of the couple’s children. The film was primarily shot indoors, despite the beauty of the Copacabana beach and its sea opposite the house. In this home, initially, love and life, warmth and joy prevail; but, one day, injustice and extreme abuse of power interrupts, and everything changes. A dark shadow falls.

Salles’ film is a work that stretches into the present, into a today which does not forget a past that was never sufficiently locked up, never completely made tame and harmless. That abstract, stateless time must be kept in mind so it can be kept far away, at a safe distance: with art, with words and images, with a cinema that does not turn off the light, nor the heart, nor the brain.

I’m Still Here is a film constructed entirely around feelings of loss and the civil and moral battle of a profoundly scarred, but not resigned, woman.

A woman fighting to stop the disappearance of her husband – one of the many desaparecidos of Brazil (and not only of Brazil) about whom history tragically tells us – being silenced and forgotten.

Eunice is first consumed by fear, and then by anguish and the physical and mental suffering of being denied her dignity when, along with her second daughter, she herself is detained for days in the military’s prison cells.

Eventually, a constant, insurmountable, all-consuming pain assaults her, only bearable through her love for her children and the search to defend the rights of the most fragile and for the truth – which would only come to light in 1996.

She lives through it all with strength, this woman, full of knowing looks, who makes herself (together with the house itself) a symbol and megaphone for a reality known to an unacceptable number of people around the world, yesterday and today, as well as to oppressed peoples, who we must all focus our attention on and remember.

Eunice Paiva graduated with a law degree at 48 years old, building – on top of the wounds that never healed – a career as a university lecturer.

She dedicated her private life to the suffering of others, defending the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, never ceasing to fight for justice in the tragic story of her husband, in his murder.

She was an exceptional woman, to which this film justly pays homage.

Article translated into English by Becca Webley