I'm Still Here (2024)

I finally saw the last of the 2025 Best Picture nominations, and this was fantastic. It is also based on a real story, and the film recreates the settings and the time. It is 1970 in Rio de Janeiro, where Eunice and Rubens live with their five children by Leblon Beach. With white sand as soft as pillows and blue seas as clear as the sky, the idyllic locale should be a soft landing for the Paiva family. An architect and former congressman, Rubens has only recently returned to the country after a six-year self-exile due to the 1964 coup d’état. For the family, however, the dictatorship is never far from the foreground. Military helicopters fly over the beach, and trucks carrying additional troops occupy the streets. Television news stations cover the release of the German and Swiss ambassadors from anti-government factional custody. Rubens also takes secret phone calls in his office, coordinating pickups and drop-offs of packages. The collapse occurs when Rubens is taken for questioning by plain-clothed army officials, a catastrophe that takes the film to darker places and engenders many unanswerable questions. And while it’s not a spoiler to say Eunice and her children will never see Rubens again, those hopeless queries aren’t necessarily what the movie is about. Rather, this poignant film concerns the response to having neither a definitive answer nor final closure. Eventually, Eunice and Eliana will be taken in for questioning, psychologically tortured, and then released. Eunice will pick up the pieces and dig, becoming politically active in the process. We will follow her struggle through the decades—her career as a professor and supporter of Indigenous rights—leaping to São Paulo in 1996 before settling in 2014. She made a life after that was both all her own and honored the legacy of her husband.