Movie Review | I’m Still Here

I’m Still Here (Photo – Sony Pictures Classics)

Covering nearly 50 years of Brazilian history through the lens of its main character, Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here is a powerful testament to human endurance and inner strength.

I’m Still Here
Directed by Walter Salles – 2025
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan

Based on the experiences of human rights advocate Eunice Paiva, the film begins with idyllic scenes of family life shot in handheld, grainy “home” movie style. These moments of domestic bliss are gradually undone by signs of creeping totalitarianism: a helicopter swooping down from the skies, a car with teenagers pulled over at a military checkpoint and its occupants harshly interrogated, and a peaceful beach scene in Rio de Janeiro undercut by the passing of a military convoy with armed soldiers. Slowly, an atmosphere of paranoia and fear takes hold.

The threat of a communist-hunting dictatorship soon looms over Eunice Paiva’s family—her husband and their six children. Eunice, following her husband, takes a ride downtown in order to answer questions. The horrors of the 20^th Century (still with us, perhaps more so than ever) are depicted vividly, but without graphic detail. The absurdity and terror she faces, which words like Kafkaesque or Orwellian hardly do justice to, culminate in her weeks-long incarceration in a barren cell, interrupted only by forced examinations of photographs in which she is made to identify individuals the military government has labeled subversives.

Uncharged, Eunice is released and returns home, where she must hold her family together while searching for information and justice—an emotionally demanding balancing act for which actress Fernanda Torres gives full measure. (Eunice, as an older woman, is portrayed by another Fernanda, Montenegro, who starred in Salles’s excellent 1998 film Central Station.)

This is a powerful film, and after seeing I’m Still Here, I have to admit a personal oversight: while I knew about the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, Salles’s film opened my eyes to this dark chapter in Brazil’s history, where my thoughts were previously clouded by thoughts of “The Girl From Ipanema,” and the Samba.

I’m Still Here was a real eye-opener.

> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, AMC Burbank Town Center 8, AMC The Grove 14 and Laemmle Royal.