'It's exactly what the country needs': How Brazil propelled drama I'm Still Here to be this year's Oscars dark horse

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Starring Fernanda Torres and centring on a family torn apart by Brazil's military dictatorship, I'm Still Here is up for three major awards – and could pull off an upset on the night.

When the Oscar nominations were announced, the surprising strength of Walter Salles's I'm Still Here – with nods for Fernanda Torres as best actress, best international film and most unexpected of all best picture – caused celebrations in Brazil. "I'm so proud! Kisses to Fernanda Torres and Walter Salles," the country's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, posted on X. Emotionally powerful and eloquent, the film tells the real-life story of a family living under Brazil's two-decade military dictatorship, which ended in 1985. In 1971, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a former congressman, was taken by military police and never seen again, leaving his wife, Eunice (Torres), to create a future for herself and her five children. In the following years, as Eunice returns to school and becomes a prominent human rights lawyer, she never stops trying to find the truth about her husband's fate and to hold the state accountable. And on the day the nominations were announced, 23 January, the film and reality intersected again. Paiva's death certificate, which had declared him missing, was amended to reflect the reality that his death was "violent, caused by the Brazilian state".

Fernanda Torres plays Eunice Paiva, the wife of congressman Rubens, who was taken by Brazilian military police in 1971 and never seen again (Credit: Sony Pictures Classics)

I'm Still Here is an Oscar dark horse and much more. It now looks like the frontrunner in the international category, and Torres has at least a realistic chance of upsetting the best actress frontrunner, Demi Moore. Behind those nominations is an alchemical mix of the personal, the political and the artistic. Few films have depicted the devastating effects of politics on individuals in such an intimate, visceral or timely way, arriving at a moment when the rise of authoritarianism has become a global concern.

"I was always tempted by filmic narratives in which the journey of the characters somehow blends with the journey of a country," Salles tells the BBC. And while the film is explicitly about the Brazilian dictatorship, and has been a big commercial hit in that country – becoming the highest-grossing homegrown film there since the pandemic – it has also touched audiences around the world. Its global box-office numbers are remarkable for a low-budget film: more than $25m, including more than $3m in just a month in the US, where it is still playing strongly in cinemas.

Why Brazil has got behind it

The film's awards journey has been propelled by its impact in Brazil, where Torres is a major star with an enormous social media following. Isabela Boscov, a Brazilian journalist and film critic, tells the BBC: "What is really unusual in Brazil is a film that is not a comedy having that sort of box office. That hasn't happened in years and years." She attributes the success to a combination of factors, including Torres's popularity, how realistically the film captures 1970s Brazil, and the national mood. The country's recent history has been tumultuous. Jair Bolsonaro's far-right government was in power from 2019 to 2023. When he lost the 2022 election, his supporters stormed the Congress, presidential palace and Supreme Court, and last year Bolsonaro was formally accused of allegedly plotting a coup. "Walter Salles has this gift for encapsulating exactly what the country needs, for really touching the zeitgeist," Boscov says. "At the moment Brazil is a very divided country in terms of thought and ideology. And I think half of the country would like to face whatever happened in the past [during the dictatorship], so as to prevent it from happening again.

A photograph of the real Paiva family, including Eunice and Rubens – director Walter Salles knew them personally as a teenager (Credit: Lais Morais/ Reuters)

All the attention and manoeuvring wouldn't have mattered, of course, if voters and audiences weren't responding so strongly to the film itself. Although it deals with tragedy, it is also full of warmth, and begins with scenes of the Paiva family and their friends, laughing and dancing at dinners and at the beach, living a full life.  Salles knew the family personally as a young teenager in Rio de Janeiro. "I was invited into that house, into the intimacy of that family. I was enamoured of it," he says. Recreating its atmosphere is a way of welcoming viewers into the film. The family is always aware of the dangers around them, though. Driving home from a film, one of the teenage daughters and her friends is pulled over and questioned by police.

The long road to production

Salles's films include Central Station (1998), which was also nominated for the international film Oscar and, with what turns out to be poignant symmetry, in the best actress category for Torres's mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who plays the older Eunice in I'm Still Here. Creating I'm Still Here took seven years, he says, partly because "there were so many layers of memory involved that I wanted to be faithful to". He was inspired to make the film after reading the 2015 memoir by Rubens and Eunice's son, Marcelo Paiva, who began writing it when "his mother, who had fought to preserve the family's memory for decades, was falling into the abyss of Alzheimer's, and therefore losing her memory at a time where the country was starting to lose its collective memory," Salles says. That story offered what he calls "a double reflection" on the past.

Reminding viewers of his country's past was crucial to Salles, and was another reason getting the film made took so long. "It would have been unthinkable to shoot this film during the Bolsonaro years," he says. "We would not have had permission to shoot in public spaces. Basically, we would have been able to shoot the interiors, but not the exteriors of the film. This certainly added three or four years to the development."

Salles says of the real-life woman, "Eunice is a character who refused melodrama," a quality that infuses the film and Torres's sophisticated, powerfully restrained performance. As she watches her husband taken away from their front door, calmly driving his own car as if to a friendly meeting, Eunice gives a slight, reassuring smile, but her face is a wrenching image of sorrow beneath the calm facade. Torres always allows us to see the grief and pain beneath the restraint. After Rubens' disappearance, Salles says, she was determined "not to bend to an authoritarian regime, never to allow herself to be portrayed as a victim". He points to "this extraordinary idea of whenever they wanted her to cry on camera, she would do the exact opposite, which is to smile". A scene in the film recreates just that, when a journalist asks the family not to smile for a photograph, and Eunice insists that they do.

Torres' win for best actress in a drama at the Golden Globes followed her mother Fernanda Montenegro's nomination for another Salles film, Central Station (Credit: Getty Images)

It took until 1996 for her to get a death certificate at all, the first one that erroneously listed the cause of death as "missing". In the film she proudly shows reporters the certificate and says, "Forced disappearances were one of the cruellest acts of the regime because you kill one person but condemn all the others to eternal psychological torture." Capturing that enduring grief and uncertainty is one of the film's most original, affecting accomplishments.

Even Salles couldn't have foreseen exactly how timely the film might become, although he says, "When we shot the film, we were already aware that the fragility of democracy was something that wasn't only pertinent to Brazil anymore. It was pertinent to too many countries in the world." One of the first things authoritarians routinely do, he says, is "to try to erase memory and somewhat rewrite history". Preserving that memory and history, personal and political, goes to the heart of I'm Still Here. Salles says: "I think one of the reasons the film echoed so strongly in Brazil with audiences is because they were embracing the humanity of that family, but they were also seeing a reflection of themselves on the screen, and they were accessing a part of Brazilian history that had been forgotten for too long."

I'm Still Here is out in US cinemas now and released in the UK on 21 February.