Screening Date: 27 November 2025
Screening Time: 7 pm
Release Date: 2024
Director: Walter Salles
Country: Brazil / France
Running Time: 137 mins
Rating: M
Language: Portuguese (with English subtitles)
A sweeping political-family drama, I’m Still Here follows lawyer-activist Eunice Paiva as she fights to hold her family together after her husband—a left-wing congressman—vanishes into Brazil’s 1970s military-dictatorship maw. Anchored by a career-peak performance from Fernanda Torres, the film toggles between sun-drenched Copacabana memories and the claustrophobia of authoritarian surveillance, turning one family’s loss into a nation’s reckoning.
It’s always risky when prestige period pieces lean on real trauma; you can’t help wondering if Oscar-bait gloss will mute genuine outrage. Will soft lighting sand down torture’s edges? Can a script adapted from a beloved memoir satisfy both historians and tear-jerkers? In this case, emphatically yes.
Shot on 16 mm to mimic archival newsreel, Salles’s crew dodged election-year protests and even rewrote court-scene dialogue overnight to placate nervous censors—a guerrilla spirit that mirrors Eunice’s own defiance. The gamble paid off: thunderous applause met its Venice premiere, where it scooped Best Screenplay, before topping Brazil’s 2024 box-office and hurtling into the international awards race.
More than a historical lament, I’m Still Here interrogates who writes a country’s memory—and at what cost. By the final montage of declassified files and home-movie fragments, the film asks whether justice delayed can ever be justice delivered.
“Classical in form but radical in empathy… we don’t want to leave these characters.” – Variety
