“I’m Still Here,” a Brazilian film about a family torn apart by the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for more than two decades, won the Oscar on Sunday for best international film.
The Walter Salles film stars Fernanda Torres as Eunice Paiva, the wife of Rubens Paiva, a former leftist Brazilian congressman who, at the height of the country’s military dictatorship in 1971, was taken from his family’s Rio de Janeiro home and never returned.
The focus of “I’m Still Here,” based on the memoir by Paiva’s son Marcelo, is Eunice, the mother of five left to remake their family’s life with neither her husband nor any answers for his disappearance. It unfolds as a portrait of a different kind of political resistance — one of steadfast endurance.
Eunice refuses the military dictatorship’s attempt to break her and her family. When, in one scene, Eunice and her children — by then long without their disappeared father — pose for a newspaper photograph, she tells them to smile.
“The smile is a kind of resistance,” Torres told The Associated Press. “It’s not that they’re living happily. It’s a tragedy. Marcelo recently said something that Eunice said that I had never heard: ‘We are not a victim. The victim is the country.’”
“I'm Still Here" is a deeply Brazilian story, made by one of the country’s most acclaimed directors (Salles’ films include “Central Station” and “Motorcycle Diaries”) and starring the daughter of one of the country’s greatest stars, Fernanda Montenegro. She appears late in the film as the older Eunice.
Also nominated for best international film were Denmark’s “The Girl with the Needle,” Germany’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” Latvia’s “Flow” and France’s “Emilia Pérez,” a onetime Oscars favorite marred by controversy.
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