I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui) opens in Rio de Janeiro in 1971. The Pavia family is a happy one. Wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and husband Rubens (Selton Mello) have four daughters and one son. Director Walter Salles visited the real Pavia family when he was a child because he was a friend of the son, Marcelo. The film I’m Still Here is based on Marcelo’s autobiography.
Rubens Pavia was an engineer who had been an elected member of the national congress until a military coup overthrew the government in 1964. Keeping in mind that I’m Still Here is a true story, one day three plainclothes military thugs come to the family house and haul away Rubens. Then Eunice is taken away for interrogation, as is 15-year-old daughter Eliana (Luiza Kozovski). Eunice is kept in prison for twelve days before she is released and reunited with her five children. Rubens, however, is never seen again.
Although, at first, Eunice does not want to accept it, it becomes clear that the government has murdered her husband. She devotes her life to keeping her family together, while doggedly trying to find out what happened to Rubens. The government, meanwhile, refuses to acknowledge that he was even arrested.
I’m Still Here is Salles’ first feature film in twelve years. It is the fourth time one of his films has represented Brazil at the Academy Awards. In 1998, his film Central Station was nominated for an Oscar. Fernanda Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro, was nominated for Best Actress for her role in Central Station. In I’m Still Here, both Torres and Montenegro play Eunice Paiva. Montenegro was 94 years old when the film was made. They had previously acted together in the 2005 film House of Sand.
Many years later, after the military dictatorship is driven from power, Eunice continues her search for Rubens’ death certificate. A television reporter asks her, “Doesn’t the government have more urgent issues than fixing the past?”
“No.”
This is a lesson that other countries have learned, but which my own country, the United States, has not. As I wrote in my review of Argentina 1985, in 1963, eighteen years after the end of World War II, the German government put 22 officials of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps on trial, and seventeen of them were convicted. In Argentina, a military junta murdered, tortured and “disappeared” an estimated 30,000 Argentine citizens. When it was driven from power, and democracy was restored, the new government actually put the junta leaders on trial and convicted them In Brazil, the government perpetrators of torture and murder may not have been sent to prison, but at least their atrocities were publicly proven.
Compare this to the actions of the U.S. government under both Republican and Democratic leadership.. Many younger Americans may not know it, but when George W. Bush was president, he and CIA Director George Tenet established secret prisons in 30 countries. In many of these prisons, American citizens committed acts of extreme torture. There were members of the U.S. military who did the same. In 2008, Major General Antonio Taguba, who had earlier issued the official report on torture and rape at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, said, “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.” The answer has been “no.” When Barack Obama became U. S. president, he refused to investigate anyone for these war crimes. As for Donald Trump, when he was president, he appointed Gina Haspel, who had overseen torture, including waterboarding, in Thailand, to be the director of the CIA.
It is also worth noting that, although it is not mentioned in the film, the government of the United States actively supported the Brazilian military dictatorship. President Lyndon Johnson encouraged the coup that overthrew the elected government in Brazil. The U.S. president who was in power at the time that I’m Still Here takes place, Ricard Nixon, along with his consigliere, Henry Kissinger, fully supported the military dictatorship’s murderous tactics.
