I’m Still Here (15) |Close-Up Film Review

In 1971 Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship, a ruling power which wanted tighter and tighter control over its subjects. 

The Paiva family – Rubens (Selton Mello), Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and their five children – live near the beach in Rio de Janeiro.  In many ways it’s a happy life, swimming and playing beach games, living in a lovely, spacious house, plenty of friends.  But one night their teenage daughter Veroca (Valentina Herszage) and her friends are pulled over by the military. After a bit of roughing up they are let go but it gives us a taste of what is to come. 

Rubens, we discover, is active in the underground opposition.  Nothing particularly militant but enough to alarm the military, who want to control everything and whose informants are everywhere.  One day three quite mild mannered men turn up, claiming they need Rubens to come with them to answer a few questions.  As they wait in her kitchen, Eunice even offers them lunch.  They take Rubens away and he is never seen again. 

To add to the atmosphere of menace, Eunice and Veroca are also later taken in for questioning, subject to deprivation, isolation and constant questions about who they might know from photographs of presumably suspected dissidents.  After several days they are however  released and from then on the film is about Eunice and her children and how the woman who has been described as a Brazilian Mother Courage stoically holds her family together with loyalty and hope in the face of blank denials from the authorities that they have any knowledge of Rubens, who he is, his arrest or whether he is dead or alive.

After that dramatic first section the story sometimes seems somewhat lacking in development.  It is after all about stoically keeping going in absence.   But what holds it together is Fernanda Torres’ performance of stubborn courage, hope and determination to make life as good as she can for her children.  

Director Salles was friends with the family when he and the elder children were teenagers and the film is based on a book by the family’s only male child Marcelo.  So it is in many ways a personal and heartfelt film. 

Towards the end we jump forward 25 years to when the family finally get confirmation that Rubens is dead.  But no explanation as to how he died or who was responsible and to this day, as the post credit titles tell us, no one has been convicted for his murder.