by Alberto Piroddi
Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here is the kind of film that knocks the wind out of you, not with grandiose flourishes or manipulative sentimentality, but with a quiet, relentless force. It works its way under your skin, not through ostentatious displays of suffering but in the details—the absence that lingers in a house when a father is taken away, the silent meals, the way Fernanda Torres’ Eunice clenches her jaw as she struggles to keep her family from unraveling. It’s a film about endurance, but not in the usual cinematic sense of triumph over adversity. There’s no catharsis, no grand justice, only the aching resolve of a woman determined to carry on in a world that refuses to acknowledge her pain.
Salles, best known for Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, has never been a flashy director. He isn’t interested in the obvious tragedies or the spectacle of suffering. Instead, he hones in on the moments that define a life: the way a mother shields her children from the truth, the quiet heartbreak of opening a letter that says nothing, the bureaucratic hell of seeking an answer everyone already knows but refuses to put in writing. I’m Still Here is, in many ways, an exercise in restraint, and that’s precisely why it hits so hard.
Set against the backdrop of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the early 1970s, the film follows the disappearance of Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a left-leaning congressman abducted by the regime. But this isn’t his story. It belongs to Eunice, played with stunning subtlety by Fernanda Torres, who holds the film together with a performance that is at once controlled and devastating. This is a woman who doesn’t wail or throw herself at the feet of men in uniform—she doesn’t have that luxury. Instead, she navigates her grief the only way she can: by keeping herself together for the sake of her children, by swallowing her pain until it becomes part of her. She understands something that so many grandiose political films fail to grasp—that grief is not always loud. Sometimes, it’s just the way someone sets the table for a person who will never come home.
Torres delivers a performance so meticulous that it never feels like acting. She isn’t playing a martyr, and she doesn’t ask for sympathy. She simply exists, allowing us to witness a kind of strength that cinema often overlooks: the endurance of ordinary people forced to survive extraordinary cruelty. The weight of the film rests in her eyes, in the way she carries herself, in the careful way she speaks to her children, shielding them from the horrors of a world that has already taken so much from them. She never breaks down in a grand Oscar-clip moment, because that isn’t who Eunice is. Instead, her pain leaks through in the smallest of ways—a brief hesitation, a barely perceptible tremble in her voice. It’s one of those performances that reminds you what great acting looks like when it isn’t trying to be noticed.
Selton Mello, in his brief screen time, is equally remarkable. His Rubens isn’t a grandstanding hero but a man who knows he is living on borrowed time. There’s a heartbreaking tenderness to his scenes with his children, a quiet understanding that he may not have many of them left. When he is taken away, there is no last-minute heroism, no moment of defiance. He disappears as so many did during the dictatorship—swiftly, without explanation, leaving behind only an absence that is felt in every frame of the film. Salles understands that the true horror of authoritarian regimes isn’t just the violence, but the silence that follows. The way families are forced to move on without closure, the way questions remain unanswered, the way life is expected to continue even as the ghosts of the past linger in every shadow.
The film is visually stunning in a way that never calls attention to itself. Cinematographer Adrian Teijido frames the Paiva home with an oppressive intimacy, turning it into both a sanctuary and a prison. The use of warm, nostalgic hues in the beginning subtly shifts into colder, more muted tones as Eunice’s world shrinks. There are no overtly stylized flourishes, no self-indulgent aesthetic choices. Every shot serves a purpose, whether it’s the suffocating tightness of a family dinner or the vast emptiness of a beach where the children once played with their father. The cinematography isn’t there to impress—it’s there to immerse, to pull us deeper into the quiet devastation of this family’s loss.
Salles’ direction is refreshingly devoid of sentimentality. He never underlines the tragedy, never cues the audience on when to cry. He trusts the material, and he trusts his actors. There are moments where another filmmaker might have inserted a swelling score or a dramatic confrontation, but Salles resists. He lets the story breathe, lets the silences linger, lets the grief settle into our bones. He understands that true sadness doesn’t always need to be performed—it simply needs to be felt.
And then, of course, there’s Fernanda Montenegro. She appears only in the final stretch of the film, playing an older Eunice, but in just a few short scenes, she delivers a performance so deeply affecting that it leaves an imprint. Montenegro has a way of conveying entire histories with just a glance. In her hands, Eunice’s aging is not just physical but existential. Her body has carried decades of grief, her mind has fought against the slow erosion of memory. There is one scene—no spoilers—where all she does is sit in silence, looking at something we cannot see, and it’s one of the most hauntingly beautiful moments in the film.
This isn’t a movie that provides easy resolutions or grand statements about history. It doesn’t try to impose a moral lesson or wrap up its themes in a neat little package. Instead, it lingers, refusing to be forgotten, much like the real-life stories it’s based on. There will be people who find its pace too slow, who want bigger emotional payoffs, who expect a more conventional arc. But I’m Still Here isn’t interested in being a conventional film. It’s interested in truth, in memory, in the weight of absence.
It is, above all, a film about resilience. Not the triumphant, Hollywood kind of resilience, but the quiet, unglamorous kind—the resilience of women who keep going because they have no other choice, of children who learn to live with unanswered questions, of a country that continues to wrestle with its past even as it tries to move forward. Salles has made a film that doesn’t just depict history but resurrects it, forcing us to sit with it, to acknowledge it, to feel it.
