I feel like my movie coverage as of late has been for movies championing work that SHOULD win the Oscar this year. From the wonder of FLOW possibly winning the Best Animated Feature Oscar and the documentary SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT (a review of this is coming shortly to the site) hoping to take home Oscar gold, I wanted to focus on I’M STILL HERE, another great movie I just caught up with after missing it at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival.
About: The latest from director Walter Salles focuses on the real-life story of Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), whose terrifying experience of sequestration and loss during Brazil’s military dictatorship transformed her into an activist, lawyer, and hero. Based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir, I’M STILL HERE transports us to Rio de Janeiro in the early 1970s when Brazil’s dictatorship sought to exert its authority through detentions and disappearances. The latest from Walter Salles, director of the Oscar-nominated CENTRAL STATION and the Oscar-winning THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES focuses on Eunice Paiva, whose terrifying experiences transformed her into an activist, lawyer, and hero.
Reaction: Immediately grabbing me with its style; a fusion of hand-held photography that quickly takes us back in time, I’M STILL HERE starts in 1970 when Brazilian congressman Rubens Paiva is reunited with his large family including his wife Eunice and five kids. This is a heavily political and military time in the country and the movie takes us through a journey of Eunice being imprisoned, her husband disappearing and then coming out of that horrific situation changed and becoming an activist and then following her journey through the next few decades as she tries to find out if her husband was murdered after a miltary raid.
I have always cherished the work of Walter Salles and like many people in this corner of the world I fell in love with him as a filmmaker with THE MOTORCYLE DIARIES all the way back in the early 2000s. His other works like CENTRAL STATION, DARK WATER and his contribution to the anthology movie PARIS JE’TAIME are also notable pieces of work fom the filmmaker. I’M STILL HERE resonates just as much as his earlier work and he still has the same loving showcase of still keeping the pace moving throughout time, feeling all so real and authentic but also cinematic at the same time.
Leading all of this is an extraordinary performance by Fernanda Torres, who truly gives one of the best performances of the year with a really complicated character who learns and evolves as the movie progresses. She gets a lot thrown at her politically and even imprisonment, and I loved seeing the slow progress of her facing issues, learning from them and becoming a true underdog wanting change in her country. But she is a mother first, and you can clearly feel the connections she made not only through her husband but her kids. Everything about this work is perfection and I wish she would win the Oscar.
The look and design of Salles’ movies is also always important. One thing I really responded to was the look starting out with a heavy, grainy film look that gets brighter and cleaner as the years progress. The movie covers a long time period and goes all the way until the mid 2010s when we see Eunice with Alzheimer’s disease as well as how her hard work also passed along to her kids, who are all their own journey.
I’M STILL HERE absolutely works as a time capsule of a time and place and is so involving and memorable that I can’t wait to see it again just to take in all of the detail and bask in Torres’ unforgettable performance. This is also something to see IN a cinema and not wait to come to home video or streaming as it is such a beautiful piece of work from Mr. Salles. Don’t miss it.
I’M STILL HERE is now playing in select cities in North America. Special thanks to Bonne Smith and Mongrel Media for helping setting us up with screening this title for review.