Virginia Film Festival

Official Oscar^© Selection—Brazil

The latest from Academy Award-winning director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) focuses on the real-life story of Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), whose terrifying experience of sequestration and loss during Brazil’s military dictatorship transformed her into an activist, lawyer, and hero.

Based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir, I’m Still Here transports us to Rio de Janeiro in the early 1970s when Brazil’s dictatorship sought to exert its authority through detentions and disappearances. The Pavia family work hard to maintain an oasis of normalcy and warmth inside their home—continuing to host large family gatherings, dinner parties, and record-listening sessions—as much for their kids’ sanity as their own. They can only stave off the real world for so long however, and soon the dictatorship comes knocking at their door.

An engrossing and deeply moving film, that gives voice (replete with humor, agency, and color) to those who refused to cower in the face of history’s turmoil.