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04-03-2025
LOS ANGELES/ RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazilian drama “I’m Still Here,” about a matriarch whose husband is taken away by the military regime that ruled the country in the 1970s, won the Academy Award for best international feature film on Sunday.
The film, which also earned nominations for best actress and best picture, tells the true story of Eunice Paiva’s struggle to uncover the truth about her husband’s forced disappearance in 1971. It was directed by Walter Salles, whose 1998 film “Central Station” was also nominated for best foreign film, as the category was then known.
A number of Brazilian productions have been nominated in the international feature, directing and documentary categories, but none has won, although “Black Orpheus,” a Brazilian co-production with France and Italy, won in 1959.
The other nominees this year were France’s “Emilia Perez,” “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” from Germany, Latvian animated film “Flow,” which also competed in the animated feature category, and Denmark’s “The Girl with the Needle.”
(Writing by Nick Zieminski; Editing by Howard Goller)
I’m Still Here, seen by over 4.1 million
On January 8, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva stood in the capital Brasilia and uttered three words that would tie past to present.
“Today is the day to say it loud and clear; we’re still here.”
It was a reference to the biographical drama I’m Still Here, a film seen by over 4.1 million Brazilians, making it one of the country’s highest-grossing films ever.
On Sunday, it competes in three categories at the 97th annual Academy Awards, where it will be the first Brazilian film shot in Portuguese to be in contention for the much-coveted Best Picture Oscar but the movie is more than a box office success. For many in Brazil, it is a portal to confront a violent past, one that has yet to be fully reckoned with.
In 1964, the Brazilian army overthrew the government, plunging Brazil into a military dictatorship that would rule for more than two decades.
Journalism was censored. Suspected dissidents were detained by the thousands without trial. And hundreds simply disappeared in official custody, never to return. At least 434 people were killed, though some experts say the number could be as high as 10,000.
Few monuments or museums exist in Brazil to keep the memory of those events alive. And since the dictatorship passed a sweeping Amnesty Law in 1979, Brazil has never prosecuted any of the military officials responsible for the widespread human rights abuses.
Ivo Herzog, a human rights advocate, said the film has helped to pierce the silence surrounding that history.
“The main importance of the film is that it was able to break through the bubble,” Herzog said. “It brought a little of this indignation that we’ve been experiencing for so long to people who haven’t lived this story, to people who don’t understand.”
Ivo was only nine years old when his father, the prestigious journalist Vladimir Herzog, was tortured and killed by the military in 1975.
In October of that year, the elder Herzog answered a summons to testify before military officials. He left voluntarily for the army barracks. He never came home.
The military tried to frame Herzog’s death as a suicide: It even released a staged photograph of his body, hanging from a rope. But the attempted cover-up prompted one of the first major protests against the military dictatorship.
I’m Still Here chronicles a similar story. Directed by Walter Salles, it follows the real-life events of January 1971, when former Congressman Rubens Paiva was taken into custody, never to be seen again. (Int’l News Desk)
