Material memories in I'm Still Here
In I’m Still Here (2024), characters are constantly recording. But the tools of preserving memory are also the tools used by regimes for surveillance.
Between 1964 and 1985, Brazil lived under a military dictatorship. During those 21 years, hundreds of people deemed dangerous to the regime were “disappeared”, and thousands more were tortured and detained. But private lives continued throughout the tyranny. Families still hosted dinner parties and played games at the beach. They took photographs of each other. They smiled.
According to the Brazilian National Trust Commission, 434 people were killed or disappeared by the regime during the dictatorship. One of those people was Rubens Paiva, a former Labour Congressman turned engineer who secretly continued to support political expatriates. I’m Still Here (2024), directed by Walter Salles, dramatises the moment he is taken away from his wife and five children for questioning. He kisses his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and assures her he’ll be back in time for the souffle she’s prepared. Both Eunice and we the audience never see Rubens again.
From that moment on, the film focuses on Eunice and her search to find out what happened to her husband. As she describes at one point, the regime’s victims include the families of the disappeared, who must endure their own psychological torture, not knowing whether their loved ones are dead or alive. Based on the memoir written by Rubens and Eunice’s son Marcelo, I’m Still Here brilliantly depicts how the politics of oppression seeps into the domestic sphere, even into one’s own thoughts. There are certainly moments of violence in the film, as when Eunice herself is detained and isolated for two weeks, but largely the turmoil happens in the characters’ - and, by extension, the audience’s - imagination.
The film has been a commercial and critical success, both in Brazil and internationally. Despite a coordinated boycott effort by the far-right, audiences have flocked to screenings in its home country, making I’m Still Here the highest-grossing film in Brazil since the pandemic. I’m Still Here is nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, one of only a handful of non-English language films to have ever been nominated in that category.
Videos, photographs and letters all connect the characters with other members of their family, but they are also used as evidence by the regime.
Salles has said that films are “instruments against forgetting” and that “cinema reconstructs memory.” This is particularly important in Brazil, which has never formally held military figures accountable for torturing civilians during the regime. I’m Still Here doesn’t just dramatise the past; it also interrogates the political importance of remembering itself. It’s no coincidence that the characters in I’m Still Here are constantly recording: Vera, the eldest daughter, documents everything on her Super-8 camera. Characters write and read aloud letters to each other. And at several points during the film - on the beach, at the dinner table, at a party - characters pose for photographs.
Videos, photographs and letters all connect the characters with other members of their family, but they are also used as evidence by the regime. When Eunice is interrogated by the secret police, she is asked to identify subversives by their photograph. What I’m Still Here recognises is that photographs and letters feed into an official system of surveillance. Photographs taken for personal reasons can be adopted by political powers; the camera, like the state, is never neutral, argued art historian John Tagg.
Fernanda Torres’ resilience burns through the screen as we follow her search for justice, a search that takes years. The necessity of burying one’s dead (both literally and metaphorically) is as old as Antigone. By the end of the film - decades after Rubens’ disappearance - Eunice is no longer looking for her husband, but instead acknowledgement from the state that he has died in the form of a death certificate. As she admits, it’s ironic that receiving a death certificate should be a triumphant moment. But the document represents a piece of concrete evidence after years of official lies, mistruths and evasions.
Rubens, movingly played by Selton Mello, represents one kind of political resistance: underground meetings, the passing of secret documents. But Eunice, in her determination not only to uncover the truth of her husband’s disappearance but also to provide a degree of normality for her family, embodies another kind of resistance, one that refuses to allow the arms of the regime into the domestic sphere. Dictatorships thrive on fear, and so continuing to laugh is its own kind of resistance. This is embodied in a scene towards the end of the film. Eunice and the children are interviewed by a journalist about Rubens’ disappearance and are asked to pose for a photograph. But when the photographer admonishes them for looking happy - the editor wants them sad - Eunice is defiant. “We’ll smile,” she tells the photographer. And they do. They smile.