Brazilian director Walter Salles’ fact-based I’m Still Here is among the best political pictures in years.
AFI FEST 2024: Film Review
According to its mission statement, “AFI FEST… showcase[es] the best films from across the globe to captivated audiences in Los Angeles. With a diverse and innovative slate of programming, the film festival presents a robust lineup of fiction and nonfiction features and shorts… along with panels and conversations featuring both master filmmakers and new cinematic voices.” The American Film Institute’s annual film fete is taking place through October 27 at the TCL Chinese Theatre (that iconic movie palace formerly known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, with stars’ cement footprints in its famed courtyard) and the nearby TCL Chinese 6 Theatre, located beside Hollywood Blvd.’s fabled “Walk of Fame.”
Among AFI FEST’s global panoply of pictures, ranging across the cinematic spectrum from features to documentaries, studio movies to indies, this year AFI’s 38th festival screened at least three top notch films with political themes. Here’s a review of the first of them:
Motorcycle Diaries Walter Salles Rides Again with One of the Best Political Pictures in Years: I’m Still Here
Brazilian director Walter Salles’ fact-based I’m Still Here is among the best political pictures in years. It succeeds so completely because it is very much a family drama – but one that shows how politics can profoundly affect a family. Like Salles’ Argentine counterpart, Santiago Mitre’s 2023 Argentina, 1985 about “the Dirty Wars,” which was Oscar-nominated for Best International Feature Film and won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, I’m Still Here focuses on the impact military dictatorships have on ordinary South Americans.
The real-life Rubens (Selton Mello) and Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres when she’s middle aged and Fernanda Montenegro when Eunice is older) have five children together. Early on in a telling scene I’m Still Here cleverly shows how close this middle class family’s loving bonds are. Circa 1970, when the children encounter a stray dog on a Rio de Janeiro beach while playing volleyball, one of the sons takes the scraggly pooch to his dad’s nearby office to ask if the children can keep him. When told by presumably a secretary that his engineer father is in a very important business meeting and can’t be disturbed, the lad blithely ignores her and marches into his dad’s inner sanctum with said mutt. But instead of getting angry at being interrupted by his son, the bemused pop reluctantly acquiesces to his boy’s pleas to adopt the dog as a pet. In this family, love trumps business.
Likewise, very early on, the repressive rule of Brazil’s military dictatorship is quickly established when after the volleyball match, teenagers including the Paivas’ eldest daughter, are pulled over in their car in a tunnel to be roughly searched by military police, who are hunting for anti-junta “terrorists” who kidnapped a foreign ambassador.
The nurturing, intimate ties between the family, and the romantic love between the parents is genuinely heartwarming – and very essential to the plot that unfolds. As it turns out, we eventually learn Rubens is a former congressman, and that he is involved in clandestine resistance activities opposing the military regime that seized power in Brazil following a 1964 coup. I’m Still Here makes the point that the former member of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies was not part of the “armed struggle” opposing the junta, but rather took part in nonviolent acts such as surreptitiously passing correspondence by members of the resistance.
Inexorably, that dreaded knock on the door arrives at the Paiavas’ household and the secret police take Rubens off to god-knows-where to interrogate him. The rest of I’m Still Here dramatizes the family’s crusade, aided by members of the opposition, to find out where their father/husband/companero is and what actually happened to the former congressman. This is a truly heartbreaking movie, but as actor Selton Mello who played the disappeared ex-deputy told the AFI audience when introducing its screening, I’m Still Here “is an important, necessary film.” Indeed, given the fascistic (should I drop the “ic” now?) Trump’s threats to unleash the national guard and military against “enemies within” and his hordes of MAGA maggots, this drama about the repression of Brazil’s 21-year-old military dictatorship is especially relevant.
Salles’ 2004, Robert Redford exec produced The Motorcycle Diaries, with Gael Garcia Bernal as the young Che Guevara, won an Academy Award in a music category and received another nomination. 1998’s Central Station received two Oscar noms, for Best Foreign Language Film and for Fernanda Montenegro as Best Actress. Along with Santiago Mitre and his 2023 Argentina, 1985, as well as Chilean Pablo Larrain’s 2012 No and 2016 Neruda, etc., South America – where the Left holds sway arguably more than at any other continent – is leading the world in political cinema in the finest tradition of Sergei Eisenstein, Costa-Gavras and Gillo Pontecorvo. Indeed, the title of I’m Still Here harkens back to Costa-Gavras’ Z, which translated from the Greek into English means “He Lives” – a reference to another wronged anti-militarist leader.
For anyone who loves films with leftist themes, family sagas and top notch acting, don’t miss the superlative, deeply moving I’m Still Here, which is likely to be remembered during awards season and proves that movies with humanistic progressive themes are also still very much here. Bravo!
I’m Still Here is 135 minutes long and mostly in Portuguese, with English subtitles.
For info about AFI Fest see: https://fest.afi.com/ more info about AFI FEST 2024 and tickets (which are selling out fast) see: https://fest.afi.com/.
