Walter Salles is, rather surprisingly, thought to be the third-wealthiest film director in the world, after George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, with an estimated net worth of $4.2bn. Although his films have been successful enough, they are not the source of his riches.
He comes from one of the most prominent families in Brazil, his father, Walter Moreira Salles, having been the chairman of Unibanco and twice the Brazilian ambassador to the United States. Walter Salles had an international education, before attending film school at the University of Southern California.
Does this background have any relevance to his film-making? Perhaps more by reaction than anything else. His acclaimed second film, Central Station (1998), tracked desperately impoverished lives. An embittered and untrustworthy retired schoolteacher turned letter-writer for hire embarks on a road trip across the country with a motherless little boy in search of his missing father – but only after she has regretted selling him for organ-harvesting so she can buy a new TV. Central Station won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and its superb lead, Fernanda Montenegro, was nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars, only to lose out, absurdly, to Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love.
I’m Still Here – a crap title, in English anyway, previously attached to a Sondheim song and a mockumentary about Joaquin Phoenix – heads the other way, towards the establishment. Salles’s first feature-length drama since his indulgent adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in 2012, it tells the true story of the arrest and disappearance of the dissident former congressman Rubens Paiva in 1971, and the effect it had on his family during the long rule of the military dictatorship in Brazil. It is based on the 2015 autobiography of his son Marcelo Rubens Paiva, and is nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars.
Salles has been a friend of the Paiva family since his teenage years, and the film is one of deep affection and respect. The first half hour is a celebration of their lifestyle in 1970, in a big house right on the beach in Rio, all doors and windows open, an idyll of warmth, kindness and fun. Rubens (Selton Mello) is wonderfully genial to all his family, playing Subbuteo with his sparky son, indulgently welcoming a cute stray dog the boy finds on the beach. His four daughters are always dancing and singing together, while his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), keeps it all going, turning out great soufflés. All of this section is gorgeously coloured and active, the camera inserting us right in the midst of the family, supplemented by Super 8 footage the kids take themselves. This part has the texture of golden memory; only a complete churl would bring to mind Philip Larkin’s “I Remember, I Remember”.
There are premonitions of darkness, though. Helicopters clatter by, lorries full of soldiers pass. Posing for a family photo on the beach, they all chant, “Ditch the dictators!” Rubens, as well as planning out a whopping new house for the family, keeps taking mysterious phone calls.
Unidentifiable armed men come to the house. Rubens is driven away for a “deposition”, confidently saying, as he goes, “I’ll be back for the soufflé.” He is not. Soon Eunice and one of her daughters are taken away too, blindfolded, interrogated in darkened barracks echoing with the screams of the tortured.
After some days, Eunice is released but learns nothing about what has become of Rubens. Her courage is astonishing as she fights to keep normality, even happiness, in the family, while facing the long struggle to discover what happened to her husband. It is a tremendously controlled and inward performance by Torres, for which she has been Oscar nominated, as her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, was before her. Her face holds the whole film. Time moves on 25 years, to her moment of bitter victory – and then again, another 20, to 2014. Eunice, played now indeed by the 95-year-old Montenegro, is wheelchair-bound and wordless – but her face lights up on seeing her husband’s case mentioned on TV.
I’m Still Here doesn’t explain the nature of the dictatorship or how Eunice Paiva fought her campaign. Rather, it offers this family’s specific journey as emblematic of the whole history of the country in this era. “Our film is only political because it’s about the human spirit,” Salles has stated. It’s a grand stance to take, but the movie vindicates it.
“I’m Still Here” is in cinemas now
[See also: The White Lotus is as good and twisted as ever]
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This article appears in the 19 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Europe Alone