I'm Still Here is contained and devastating

I’m Still Here is not an easy film to watch, given the anguish it evokes and the helplessness it exposes. However, it is mandatory, especially for nostalgic individuals of an era they never lived, who boast that it was "good" for Brazil.

It was not. From the very first moment, when housewife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) swims in the calm waters of Leblon beach in Rio de Janeiro, a military helicopter, flying low, darkens the previously tranquil landscape with the noise of its rotor, like a metaphor.

The script is based on a true story, from the film's namesake book, written by Eunice's son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, and recounts the last moments of his father, former federal deputy Rubens Beyrodt Paiva.

A jolly father (Selton Mello physically resembles him), from the upper-middle class, Rubens has a peaceful life, economically stable and many ongoing real estate projects.

The house is always full of festivities, with many friends, dances, drinks, good cigars, and international travels. Within this happy setting, Eunice intuits that something is happening and fears every time Rubens receives mysterious phone calls.

The threat materializes

On January 20, 1971, the threat materializes in the form of a group of armed men who appear out of nowhere, invade the house, manipulate the couple's records and books, and "invite" Rubens to give a statement at the Army barracks.

Adrian Tejido's nuanced and nervous photography becomes static and somber. Eunice and her 15-year-old daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) are taken to DOI-CODI, where we are literally left in the dark, until the protagonist returns home, without her husband.

From that point on, Fernanda Torres becomes Maria Lucrécia Eunice Facciolla, one of the many women who faced the military dictatorship and led the fight against information manipulations to conceal the fate of prisoners, tortured and murdered.

Eunice's struggle only finds closure 25 years later, when in 1996, she obtained a death certificate and acknowledgment of her husband's death by the dictatorship.