When Walter Salles first learn the novel “I’m Still Here,” written by his childhood pal Marcelo Rubens Paiva, it took him again to his adolescence. An period during which Brazil had not utterly misplaced its innocence. In 1969, after spending 5 years overseas, Salles and his household returned to Rio de Janeiro. Then 13, he grew to become associates with the 5 kids of the Paiva household. And though the nation was below a army dictatorship, Paiva’s home, simply steps from a paradisiacal seashore, was a kind of sanctuary.
“We all gravitated in direction of that home as a result of it was the alternative nook of what was occurring in Brazil on the time,” Salles remembers. “There was free speech; we might speak about completely something. Censored music on the radio was performed constantly on their document participant. You might begin a political dialogue with the dad and mom, after which you might speak about music and no matter was occurring on the time – an interesting time as a result of the world was being redefined at the moment, and Brazil was in the other way. So, in some ways in which home and that household have been a microcosm of a rustic all of us needed to dwell in.”
As depicted in Salles’ movie of the identical title, the household patriarch, former MP Rubens Paiva, was arrested and brought in for questioning on January 20, 1971. He was by no means seen alive once more. It took greater than 20 years for his spouse, Eunice Paiva, performed primarily by Fernanda Torres within the movie, for his dying to be formally acknowledged by a Brazilian authorities intent on transferring on.
“While we have been creating (the movie), the zeitgeist modified utterly and we have been confronted with the rise of the far proper in Brazil,” says Salles. “And their speech was, ‘Let’s return to the fantastic instances of army dictatorship.’ And there we immediately realized that we have been making, sure, a movie about our previous, however on the similar time we have been making a movie in regards to the current – what we have been experiencing in each dialogue on each avenue nook.”
It took Salles and his artistic companions seven years and at the very least 28 variations of the script earlier than they have been positive to start manufacturing. The movie finally premiered on the 2024 Venice Film Festival and was chosen as an Oscar-nominated worldwide movie from Brazil. Salles instantly informs the viewer of the political context of the story: the ominous risk of authoritarian rule is current within the very first picture, a shot of a lady, Eunice Paiva, swimming within the ocean.
“It might be heaven, however then there is a army helicopter flying overhead, and that helicopter is menacingly low, and it should not be,” Salles says. “So there’s one thing proper from the start that’s type of destabilizing and that type of echoes right here and there within the first half-hour of the movie. For us, that scene has at all times been a bit just like the equal of a Greek omen firstly of a tragedy by Aeschylus. The birds, the vultures circle.”
Fernanda Torres stars in “I’m Still Here,” primarily based on the story of a Brazilian household that director Walter Salles met as a baby.
(Alile Onawale/Sony Pictures Classics)
Salles misplaced contact with the Paivas after they left Rio within the early Nineteen Seventies. Marcello’s novel triggered in Salles a want to revisit that period, on this case, with the story of a destroyed household and a matriarch who needed to reinvent herself to provide her kids any type of future. The director calls it a “microcosm of humanity in a time of turmoil.” And, alongside along with his celebrated movies like “Central Station” and “The Motorcycle Diaries,” it was one other alternative to share the collective journey of a rustic via the person tales of its folks.
“I did not know all of the layers of the story, and I did not know the extent to which this lady had managed to reinvent herself, had one way or the other discovered a solution to erode an autocratic authorities utilizing very particular weapons,” Salles says. “So the ebook was instrumental in getting me in. And then the entire household supported me lots in these years and despatched me a lot of info, a lot of images. And that is what metaphorically allowed me to reopen that home. I felt invited to reopen that home.”
Together with screenwriters Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, Salles understood that Eunice Paiva was a lady filled with iron dedication but additionally inner contradictions. She by no means allowed herself or her household to be photographed by the federal government with out a smile. He by no means allowed the federal government or the press to see his kids cry.
“This is a lady fueled by extraordinary inside energy, who additionally knew how one can utter very touching phrases and, on the similar time, appear sober,” observes Salles. “It’s like a volcano that is at all times near erupting however does not really erupt. There’s at all times one thing effervescent inside her that she one way or the other manages to carry again. There is one thing really extraordinary and heroic about his confrontation with that regime. But however, it was actually laborious for his kids to have a mom who by no means actually shared what occurred to their father. He by no means articulated it clearly, thus depriving them of the prospect to succeed in a conclusion.
“As Fernanda Torres says, ‘In tragedy you do not cry; you must confront, welcome after which react.’ And that is what he did. And with a unprecedented inside energy, but additionally an amazing ambivalence.”
