When Walter Salles was around 13 or 14 years elderly, he became friends with the five children of the Paiva family in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro,
When Walter Salles was around 13 or 14 years elderly, he became friends with the five children of the Paiva family in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He learned about politics there, as the kids’ father, Rubens, was a progressive former congressman who remained politically busy. He learned about music and culture from all of the noted comings and goings at the house. And he learned a whole lot about life—observing, if not fully understanding, a family’s rich and joyous existence amid a time of great strife. “For that family to live with that intensity was a form of resistance under a military dictatorship,” Salles says.
Those memories give great texture to I’m Still Here, the veteran filmmaker’s fresh ’70s-set movie, his first solo Brazilian feature in more than 20 years. The film examines the moments leading up to when Rubens (Selton Mello) is kidnapped by the regime taking power in Brazil, then traces the immediate aftermath as his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), seeks justice—first in the form of finding her husband, and then, as that dream fades, in the form of fighting for democracy and resisting the brutality of authoritarianism. Through an intimate focus on familial love and political awakening, the biopic charts the birth of an extraordinary activist.
The story speaks to thousands of others like it in Brazil—just one reason why the film has emerged as a box office phenomenon in the country. But I’m Still Here has gone on to remarkable success around the world, speaking urgently to a frail global moment regarding democracy and censorship. Despite its relatively modest profile in the US, it’s up for three Oscars: best actress (Torres, who already won the Golden Globe), best international feature, and, most impressively, best picture—a first for Salles, the director behind such Oscar-nominated hits as Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries.
On this week’s Little Gold Men, the director reflects on the movie’s unlikely journey—so unlikely, in fact, that it was not possible to make this movie in Brazil for years before it was shot.
Vanity Fair: This is a very local story resonating not just in the United States, but around the world. How have you observed this?
Walter Salles: We were driven, throughout the whole process of preparing the film and then shooting the film, by a very sturdy desire to tell this story. We wanted to invite the spectator to have a peek at the story of that one family. It was an extraordinary human journey of featherlight at the very beginning, and then a journey defined by a tragedy, which is the moment where the father is taken away by an authoritarian regime, and the mother has to become mother and father, protect the five kids, and articulate forms of resistance—and, at the end of the day, embrace life.
We were so enamored by this story to start with that we never anticipated whether it would find a public outside of the Brazilian frontiers, and even in the Brazilian frontiers. It wasn’t clear whether the public would come back to the cinemas because the pandemic in Brazil was very brutal; we didn’t have vaccines and so forth. The public had been shying away from the movie theaters, and we thought that this film had to be shared collectively. Now almost 5 million Brazilians have come to watch the film, which had never happened to any film I’ve done before. In a moment where people were talking about the death of cinema in Brazil, to see that on the opposite, it’s the celebration.
Let’s talk a little bit about your relationship with Fernanda Torres. You first made a film with her about 30 years ago, Foreign Land, which was your second feature. You’d worked with her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, on Central Station, and she appears in this film too. There’s so much lineage here.
What was truly unique in the experience of doing Foreign Land, which was a film shot in three continents in three and a half weeks—just for you to have an idea of how independent it was, 12 people on the set—is it talked about a period in Brazil where a lot of newborn kids from Brazil, almost 1 million newborn kids, left the country to live in exile. It was also a film about the passion we have when we’re in our 20s, the desires that keep us alive and yet are not fulfilled. It was an homage to Brazilian Cinema Novo, an homage to the nouvelle vague. The beauty of collaborating with Fernanda in that film is that she was so present in every single decision—not only the ones that pertain to her character, but the collective decisions. She was an actress that loved to talk about narrative, and I always said, You’ve been a coauthor of Foreign Land.
I say the same thing 30 years later as we meet again for I’m Still Here. I see Fernanda playing this exact role in her maturity. She has such emotional intelligence that not only did I have the most extraordinary time in actually shaping the character with her—and a character that had to be defined by restraint and by saying a lot with the least that we could, a little bit like in a Giacometti sculpture—but she was also an extraordinary magnet and inspiration for the film as a whole.
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