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‘I’m Still Here’ Review: Walter Salles’ Profoundly Moving Sense-Memory Portrait of a Family — and a Nation — Ruptured
Walter Salles' "I'm Still Here" powerfully recounts the 1970 detention and disappearance of Rubens Paiva through the eyes of his bereft family.
But on a day like this, amongst people like the Paiva family – Eunice, her engineer husband Rubens (Selton Mello) their five volleyball-playing, Coke-tanning, dog-adopting children and their live-in housekeeper Zeze (Pri Helena) — its presence is so far mostly felt only in radio reports of kidnapped diplomats and in the occasional army convoy that trundles down the road separating the beach from their large, airy home. In vintage, spongy colors, interspersed with home movies shot by the eldest, movie-and-music-mad daughter, Veroca (Valnetina Herszage) on a handheld Super 8 camera, DP Adrian Teijido’s gorgeously tactile photography gives the whole film the texture of a story not being told but remembered. And perhaps most crucially, having the film end with Eunice’s now even more extended clan gathered once again in an airy garden for a smiling family photograph, turns it into a cautionary tale, addressed to those forces in Brazil and beyond, who would seek a return to repression and rule by fear.
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