I'm Still Here director Walter Salles on the tragedy he never forgot: 'I felt very much lost'

When Big Issue spoke to Walter Salles, celebrated Brazilian director of Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries and now I’m Still Here, his lead actress Fernanda Torres had not yet won a Golden Globe or been nominated for an Oscar – the biographical dictatorship drama hadn’t even been released in Brazil. In the time since, I’m Still Here has become the highest-grossing Brazilian release since the pandemic and received widespread acclaim from audiences who championed Torres’s exemplary performance and the unsparing, empathetic reflections on a painful political history.

For Salles, films like I’m Still Here “offer the possibility to understand a little better Brazilian identity in transformation. Who we were, who we are, and frankly, that may inform who we want to be”.

• The Brazilian women on the front line of the climate change fight
• This bizarre tale of a snail-obsessed misfit might be the unlikely hit of the Oscars

Torres plays Eunice Paiva, whose dissident husband Rubens is “disappeared” by military police during the Brazilian dictatorship in the 70s. This tragedy sparks Eunice’s decades-long fight to discover Rubens’ fate and keep her family united in the face of authoritarianism and national cowardice. As Salles puts it, “She had to do two things at the same time: offer a form of resistance to that oppressive regime and reinvent herself in the face of oppression.”

The film depicts a period in Brazilian history that feels urgent after years of far-right governance, corruption (including the false imprisonment of Luiz Inácio da Silva), and an attack on congress carried out by a mob of Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters.

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

“As we started to write it, it felt like we would be offering a reflection of the years that Brazil went through, and then little by little, the present caught up with us,” says Salles. “It’s something that we didn’t anticipate. We came very close to a moment where what the film describes could happen again. That informed the whole family of the film. The actors, the DP, the editor, the grip – everybody was conscious that this was about the past, but also about the kind of present we wanted to be part of.”

There are layers of historical significance to I’m Still Here not just for Brazil, but for Salles himself. “When I was 13 years old, I came back to Brazil after five years living abroad and I couldn’t recognise my own country. There was censorship everywhere, and there was armed military police on almost every corner. I felt very much lost, until I met the five kids of this unique family, the Paivas. That family carried a dream of another kind of society. And then that dream of that family was severed by a tragedy that I never forgot. I mean, no one who was in that house ever forgot. Rubens Paiva is the first father of friends of mine who disappeared during the military dictatorship.”

The director’s closeness to the Paiva story was great motivation, but it didn’t always provide clarity on how to portray it on screen. Regarding Rubens’ kidnapping in a nighttime raid on the Paiva home, Salles turned to Eunice and Rubens’ real son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, who wrote the memoir the film is based on. 

“I started to stage it, but in a more overtly violent form. Then something made me uncomfortable about that,” explains Salles. “He said, ‘Don’t think of them as thugs. Think of them as accountants – somehow sleazy accountants.’ 

“We actually altered their representation because of that, because what makes it more frightening, actually, is that they don’t look overtly menacing.”

But Salles’s personal ties extend past the characters to the actors themselves – not only did he direct Torres in his early film Foreign Land, but Central Station also secured an Oscar nomination for Fernanda Montenegro, who is Torres’s mother. (Montenegro appears briefly in I’m Still Here as an elderly version of Eunice.)

“Somehow I drift towards stories told in which the main characters are women,” Salles says. “It may have to do with the fact that Brazil, in that generation but even today, is a patriarchal society, so the feminist perception of the world offers a point of view that is subversive in form.”

I’m Still Here accesses its political power via its humanity, and vice versa. Salles remembers something Montenegro would say while shooting Central Station that almost became a mantra for his work: “We as humans have no way out but to channel things through the existential.”

“You see the political through the microcosm of a family. So I’m interested in portraying that family. I’m interested in portraying the joy that would be robbed. You understand the politics by understanding what has been subtracted from that family. The absence of Rubens is political.”

I’m Still Here is in cinemas from 21 February.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.