Walter Salles on I'm Still Here, the hit Brazilian film that's packing out cinemas in Ireland
I'm Still Here: Selton Mello, Fernanda Torres, Cora Mora and Guilherme Silveira.
It’s the Brazilian film that’s also packing out cinemas in Ireland. Now the powerful drama I’m Still Here is emerging as a dark horse for this year’s Oscars where it has three nominations - including for its leading actress.
But for acclaimed filmmaker Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) the film’s making and release is already a victory.
Speaking just after the Oscar nominations have been announced, Salles is thrilled at nods for Best Picture and Best International Feature. But he is especially pleased that Fernanda Torres - terrific as a housewife whose family life is upended by the Brazilian dictatorship - has received a Best Actress nomination. With a Golden Globe already awarded to her, Torres is this year’s dark house, with the eyes of Brazil on her come Oscar night.
“The fact that Fernanda Torres could also be nominated in her group was something that was quite special to us,” says Salles, adding that this film is all the more personal to him because he knew the family at its centre. “I was dealing with the glimpses of memory that I had from that family itself.”
Based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s family memoir of the same name, I’m Still Here centres around Eunice Paiva (Torres), who lives comfortably with her family, including politician husband Rubens, in 1970s Rio de Janeiro. But as Brazil faces the tightening grip of a military dictatorship, the family suffers a violent act that will forever change their lives.
When he first read the memoir from their son Marcelo about the desaparecidos - the people snatched from their lives by the military regime, he was deeply moved, says Salles.
“Marcelo, his parents, his four sisters, I knew them well in my adolescence. I had been in that house. I had a very personal connection even to the space, to the light that was in that room, to the music that was always informing us. That was an age, that was a decade, where the kind of music you heard defined you.
“There was an immediacy, and there was an honesty to that family that was something that I never forgot, that is very present in me still. And the joy that was a form of resistance in that family - I think that to live intensely as they lived was a form of resistance during the military dictatorship. A journey of resistance, of finding new forms of resistance is one that has a lot to do with the history of Brazil itself.”
I’m Still Here has become a phenomenon in its home country, taking over $27 million and counting. It returned to number one at the Brazilian box office 12 weeks after release and has stayed in the top five since its release in early November.
But it’s generating buzz internationally too, buoyed by strong word of mouth and its three Oscar nominations. In the US, I’m Still Here has taken over $4 million (and counting) at the box office - the first Brazilian movie to do so since City of God in 2002.
Cinemas in Ireland, too, are reporting strong demand, with both Irish film fans and Munster’s large Brazilian population turning out to see the film. In Dublin’s Light House Cinema, the film helped drive its busiest day ever, beating Barbenheimer’s opening day in 2023. Fifteen of its eighteen opening-weekend screenings were sold out - many of them weeks in advance.
Salles feels that the film’s appeal partly lies in the intimacy also evident in Marcelo’s memoir. “Rarely do we see an act of oppression through the microcosm of family, based on those who stayed behind, those who were left behind.
“It’s truly what Marcelo, who wrote this book, allowed us to do because that's the point of view that he embraced in telling the story. Ours was the longest military dictatorship in South America in the second part of the century. It lasted for 21 years. In retracing his family's journey throughout that period, he was also offering the possibility to look at the history of the country during that period. The way the specific story of his siblings and larger picture that is the country itself intermingled was really what took me to do the film. It blended the particular and the collective. And when cinema does that, or is allowed to do that, it can be potent.”
During the seven years Salles spent developing and later making the film, he says Brazil veered dangerously close to that past - which made him feel it was all the more urgent to tell the story.
“When we started to work on the project, in 2015, we were in a democratic society and the possibility of a far-right regime taking over three years later was completely distant from us, And then very rapidly, it became more and more concrete, to the point where the far right was elected in 2018 and we lived through four completely dystopian years, that we could characterise as a double pandemic because it coincided with the Covid pandemic.
“We were developing the screenplay of the project that seemed to offer, at the very beginning, a reflection of our past. Then this fact that the zeitgeist changed so brutally allowed us to understand that we were also doing a film about the present, and that granted an urgency to I'm Still Here.” As a young man, Salles considered a career in photography before turning to documentary filmmaking.
“I loved the humanist photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau. I loved the idea that Cartier-Bresson had that he would only photograph a group when he felt invited by those persons to photograph them.
“I still use that rule when I do films like Motorcycle Diaries, where a large part of the film is improvised. The people, non actors, that somehow interact with the wonderful actors we had at the heart of this. They somehow invited us to do so.”
Salles first became a filmmaker, he says, through documentary making. “I did a lot of musical documentaries before then finding the possibility to do fiction. I arrived in fiction late because I never thought I could be invited into that realm. I had too much respect for it. I met a Brazilian filmmaker from the cinema novo movement, and he invited me to be his assistant for documentaries that he did for television, and I started to learn from him and from that moment on, started to do fiction films.”
Whatever happens on Oscar night, a little bit of movie history will be made. In Salles’ 1998 drama Central Station, Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro became the first Brazilian woman to be nominated for Best Actress. She also plays the older Eunice in I’m Still Here. This year, her daughter Torres will follow her mother into the Oscars spotlight.
- I’m Still Here is now in cinemas
Kneecap fans may have felt disappointed that the film wasn’t nominated for Best International Feature at this year’s Oscars. But a simple statistic shows the sheer level of quality and competition in this category.
Of the five films up for Best International Feature, two are also up for the most coveted prize in film - Best Picture. Both I’m Still Here and French filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s Mexico-set narcos musical Emilia Pérez will also vie for the biggest award on Oscar night.
Those two films, then, must surely rank as favourites in International Feature. That category also includes the widely admired Latvian animated film Flow, The Secret of the Sacred Fig (Germany) and Denmark’s The Girl with the Needle.
The high level of competition meant that Kneecap, which had reached a shortlist of 15 films in contention, was squeezed out. Ireland has enjoyed some success in this category in the recent past - most notably when An Cailín Ciúin secured a nomination in 2023.
