I’m Still Here (2024) Review

Fernando Torres in I’m Still Here (2024)

Modern political experiences in South America concern mostly one thing, namely, the struggle for democracy, whatever that means, so very young and fragile in the continent. And, of course, like most things political, this affects almost every aspect of everyday life.

Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here (2024), a true story, taken to dramatic heights by lead actress Fernanda Torres, concerns the quotidian experience of political oppression, and the possibility of moral life under it, during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1984) which severed the social expectations of a generation. 

Eunice Paiva’s husband, a dissident politician, disappears – that is, he is murdered by the regime and his body done away with. When there’s no possibility of grief, then it turns into moral action. His absence becomes the substance of lifelong political engagement tangled up in sorrow and loss.

When the boundaries of public and private life are disrupted by State violence, then it is necessary for personal affections and memories, painful personal affections and memories, to be used as political weapons. Suffering and a yearning for the lives that could have been but were not: that’s the stuff that justice is made of.

This is a film about restorative justice, indeed, a political drama driven by despise for authoritarianism and the price paid for it. Thus it cannot help but to bring some pessimism along with it. Is justice inevitably… retrospective, never actual?  Is it always dependent on some future remembrance of the sufferings of the past? The film’s answer is in its title: to resist it is necessary to remain here. That is, if you want justice you must outlive your enemies, which requires not a small degree of stern stuff.