Remembering Is Not Enough

Remembering Is Not Enough

I’m Still Here defies the far right’s attempts to redeem Brazil’s military dictatorship. But it suggests a tidier closure to the regime’s disappearances than many real families have experienced.

Among my earliest memories from my childhood in Brazil in the 1970s is staying in my uncle’s bedroom at my grandparents’ condo. Every year, we visited them in Belo Horizonte for the Christmas holidays. In that bedroom, I could see my uncle’s clothes hanging in the closet, the papers on his desk, and the works of political and sociological theory on the shelves. Even before I could read, I loved looking at those books with strange covers, so different from the ones at home. But I never met my uncle. Carlos Alberto Soares de Freitas, my father’s baby brother, vanished in 1971 at the age of thirty-one—a victim of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 until 1985.

Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here), the new film by the accomplished Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles, explores a story similar to my uncle’s. It has already become one of Brazil’s most popular films of all time. It has also attracted international attention: it is nominated for Best Picture and Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, and its lead performer, Fernanda Torres, won the Golden Globe for Best Actress and is nominated for the Academy Award in the same category. At a moment when the far right in Brazil is attempting to redefine the country’s memory of the dictatorship, the film defies this revisionism. It also, however, suggests a tidier closure to the disappearances than many real families have experienced.

Carlos Alberto, my Tio Beto, was a student activist when, in 1967, he went underground to join the urban guerrillas resisting Brazil’s military dictatorship through armed struggle. He eventually became one of the leaders of the Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard (Vanguarda Armada Revolucionária, or VAR-Palmares), a merger of two other armed groups—and the organization to which Dilma Rousseff, who became the president of Brazil decades later, also belonged.

In his early years living underground, Tio Beto would visit my grandparents unannounced in the middle of the night. But by 1969, his visits stopped, as those escapades became too risky. The military government had included his picture, alongside other wanted “terrorists,” in posters it circulated through airports, bus stations, and police stations. His position as the head of one of the remaining underground armed groups guaranteed that the government was prioritizing his capture. Still, Beto continued to find ways to send messages to his relatives to let them know that he was alive and well. By 1971, however, these messages also stopped. After seeing a wanted poster with Beto’s picture crossed out at a police station, one of his brothers started to suspect that he had been captured. A few days later, his family received a letter, preemptively written by Beto with instructions to be delivered to his parents by people in his clandestine network. It read: “This letter will only be sent to you if I am imprisoned. The way it reaches you does not matter.”

This was the beginning of a quest that, as of 2025, remains unresolved. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Beto’s parents and siblings relentlessly searched for information about him. Initially, they sought to confirm whether he had been arrested and, if so, where he was being detained. They visited various police stations, military barracks, and prisons throughout Brazil. Everywhere they went, officials denied that Beto had ever been there but suggested rumors that he might be detained in another facility in a distant city. Through such deliberate equivocation, they made my family run in circles, hoping they would eventually give up. My father’s side of the family was middle class and had political contacts in the state of Minas Gerais, so they contacted an extensive network to find any information about my uncle’s whereabouts, but to no avail. Military officers and politicians lied to their faces, saying that my uncle had not been arrested and that they had no idea where he was. One officer, General Otávio Aguiar de Medeiros, the head of the National Information Service, warned my aunt Adi in a private meeting that the military would go after her children if the family continued digging into her brother’s fate.

By the time I remember visiting my grandparents and staying in my uncle’s bedroom as a kindergartener, most of the family had already accepted that Beto would probably never come back. In 1979, an amnesty law freed many of the country’s political prisoners and allowed the return of political exiles, but my uncle was not among them. My father and his siblings began to believe it was likely that he had been executed by the military. But my grandparents never lost faith. In the years after he disappeared, they never changed the front door lock and kept his bedroom intact, almost as a shrine, hoping he would return in the middle of the night. They kept that hope until they passed in the 1980s.

In the years that followed, my family pieced together what had happened to my uncle from fragments of information gathered from various sources. He was arrested by security agents in February 1971 in Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro. He was then taken to a newly established clandestine torture center run by the army in the old imperial resort town of Petrópolis, nestled in the mountains near Rio de Janeiro. Once at the torture center, dubbed the Casa da Morte (House of Death), Beto was tortured for two months before being executed. His body, disposed of in an unknown location, has never been found. All but one of the Casa da Morte’s prisoners, a woman named Inês Etienne Romeu, were executed. Romeu managed to escape, and later, with the support of one of Beto’s cousins, Sérgio Ferreira, played a crucial role in exposing the existence of the torture center after Brazil’s return to democratic rule in 1985. She made a point of visiting my Aunt Adi, who had spent years searching for information about her brother, to tell her that she had seen him alive at the Casa da Morte and had heard about his torture and execution while she was there.

The story of Tio Beto was ever-present in my family and influenced my own interest in Brazil’s turbulent history. I’m Still Here may do something similar for people too young to remember the dictatorship. The film tells the true story of Rubens Paiva, a former left-wing congressman who, after being forcibly removed from office and fleeing the country at the onset of the military dictatorship in 1964, returned to Brazil to live a civilian life as a civil engineer—until he was arrested and disappeared by the dictatorship in 1971.

The film centers on the quest of Paiva’s wife, Eunice, to find information about his whereabouts. There are many parallels between the Paivas’ story and that of my own family. Both Paiva and my uncle were illegally arrested, tortured, and executed by the state, whose agents then denied ever detaining them. In Paiva’s case, the cynicism and deceit was even more outrageous—as depicted in the movie, his family watched as he voluntarily put on a suit and tie and drove his own car alongside a plainclothes agent to the military detention center, only for an officer to lie to his wife’s face a few weeks later, claiming he had never been there—all while they stood next to Paiva’s parked car in the center’s parking lot. The movie also shows Eunice, who was also arrested for a few days and interrogated alongside her teenage daughter, spending months trying to find information and file a habeas corpus for a person the state officially denied ever arresting. Similar to my family, Eunice Paiva finally gets confirmation of her husband’s execution at the hands of the military from a friend and left-wing militant who visits her one night bearing the ominous news.

I’m Still Here is a superbly crafted entry in the small subgenre of movies about political disappearances. Like some of the best films in this category (in particular the greatest among them, the 1985 Argentine feature The Official Story, winner of the Oscar for Best International Feature), I’m Still Here shines in its depiction of the contrast between the normalcy of quotidian life and the abnormality of life under a military dictatorship.

In the movie, the Paiva teenagers live a happy, carefree life of family gatherings, car outings, and beach volleyball games—their home is just across from the beach in Leblon, Rio de Janeiro—until everything is disrupted by Rubens Paiva’s arrest and subsequent disappearance, followed by his wife and daughter’s arrest and, later, constant surveillance by the regime’s thugs. Fernanda Torres’s Eunice Paiva sits unquestionably at the center of the narrative and is the driving force that propels the movie forward, but these disruptions are largely seen from the perspective of the Paiva children. As the film progresses, they experience the ever-increasing intrusion of a state guided by a national security doctrine that views anything associated with left-wing ideas—including, by extension, the children themselves—as a pollutant that must be purged and destroyed.

The film, however, has its flaws. Its director, Walter Salles, is a billionaire and heir to a Brazilian banking family, and many of his films—such as Central Station (1998) and The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)—convey an overly didactic and humanistic message that betrays a certain naïveté. Salles portrays his protagonists as almost superhuman in their unwavering nobility, stripping them of contradictions and weaknesses. Their virtues enable them to face adversity with a dignity that, to a critical eye, borders on the implausible. I’m Still Here doesn’t entirely fall into this trap, but it comes close—particularly in its successive epilogues set in the 1990s and 2020s, which almost give the impression of redemption or a happy ending.

One such moment is the issuance of a death certificate for Rubens Paiva in the ’90s epilogue, which suggests a sense of closure. Yet the human rights violations of the military regime are far from a closed chapter in Brazil’s history. Many, like my uncle, have yet to receive a death certificate or a formal government apology that could provide recognition to their families. More important, none of the country’s perpetrators of human rights abuses—including torture and extrajudicial executions—have ever spent time in jail, in stark contrast to neighboring Chile and Argentina, both of which prosecuted and imprisoned some of those responsible for atrocities during their military dictatorships. The second epilogue closes the movie on an overly rosy note, depicting an elderly and frail Eunice (played by Torres’s mother, Fernanda Montenegro) who, despite suffering from Alzheimer’s and being unable to recognize her adult children, reacts to a picture of her late husband, Rubens, on television. As in many of Salles’s other film endings, this moment feels like a cheap attempt to manipulate the audience into tears.

But the film has struck a nerve with the Brazilian public. I’m Still Here shattered national box office records, drawing over 4 million people to theaters. It is the highest-grossing film since the pandemic and now ranks among the top ten box office hits of all time in Brazil—a list largely dominated by religious biopics and lighthearted comedies. Much of its success stems from its role in shaping the debate over the interpretation of the country’s twenty-one years of military rule.

After the dictatorship ended, the democratic opposition largely controlled the narrative. Three of the presidents elected thereafter—Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Dilma Rousseff—had been arrested for political reasons during the military regime. Rousseff was even tortured while in captivity. Beyond the political class, many academics, intellectuals, and artists were persecuted by the military, with some living in exile and returning during the restoration of democratic norms. In the 1990s and 2000s, their critical view of the dictatorship was hegemonic in Brazilian society, shaping the predominantly negative portrayal of military rule across K-12 education, the media, and the arts.

Cinema is a good example. Since the ’90s, Brazil has produced a series of arthouse films, such as Lamarca (1994), Four Days in September (1997), The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (2006), Baptism of Blood (2006), and Marighella (2019), that focus on those who fought against the dictatorship and were affected by its violent repression. Even popular television series and soap operas portrayed the military dictatorship through a dark lens, depicting young people being arbitrarily arrested and tortured by the regime. Shows such as Anos Rebeldes (1992), Senhora do Destino (2004–2005), Queridos Amigos (2008), Amor e Revolução (2011–2012), and Os Dias Eram Assim (2017) helped cement in the public consciousness the idea that there was nothing redeemable about the military years.

However, the rise of the far right in Brazil, marked by Jair Bolsonaro’s election as president in 2018, triggered a reaction to this narrative. Bolsonaro, a former army captain whose formative years took place during the end of the dictatorship, had spent his decades-long political career as a member of the lower house praising the military regime. If anything, he criticized it for not having killed enough leftists. Many young people who had no memories of living under a repressive regime that censored the media and policed youth mores became convinced that things had been better during that time. Even members of the working class—including the poor, black, and brown communities, who today suffer from a legacy of police brutality greatly expanded during the dictatorship—suddenly became willing to accept the myth of a military era devoid of urban crime and corruption.

In this sense, the success of I’m Still Here in Brazil can be understood as part of the renewed debate about the legacy of the dictatorship. The movie’s didactic tone and depiction of the impact of human rights violations on young people—Paiva’s children—seem tailor-made to educate generations of Brazilians born after the regime about the gruesome realities of life under it: the lack of liberties, the arbitrariness of state agents. Much of that state violence persisted after the dictatorship ended, primarily affecting black and brown youth in large cities and the countryside. I’m Still Here presents a time and place when that kind of state violence impacted not only the working class but also the children of the upper-middle class, like the Paivas.

When asked about the movie’s success, Bolsonaro—who famously spat on a bust of Rubens Paiva while serving in the Brazilian Congress—responded that he would not waste his time commenting on a film that, in his view, wrongly glorifies the life of someone who was a “communist” and a “bum.” Bolsonaro has been indicted for orchestrating a failed coup, with support from the military, against newly reelected President Lula. As part of their efforts to build momentum for the coup, Bolsonaro’s inner circle launched a coordinated attack by right-wing militants on Congress and the presidential palace in Brasília on January 8, 2023, mimicking the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

It is in this context—of a literal attack on democratic norms and institutions by a former president who built his political persona on praising and calling for the return of the military dictatorship—that the reason for the success of I’m Still Here in Brazil becomes clearer. When First Lady Janja Lula da Silva spoke at the commemoration of the second anniversary of the coup attempt on January 8, she made a point of connecting the movie’s success to the rejection of military dictatorship revisionism:

Art and freedom are inseparable. There has never been a moment in history when authoritarian actions occurred without our artists raising their voices. That is what our country has best: our people. A great example of this is our dear friend Fernanda Torres receiving an important award for I’m Still Here, portraying a strong and determined woman in a film that recalls a sad and dark part of our history that we must never forget.

I’m Still Here has renewed interest in a history that, while not entirely forgotten, has been fiercely contested by far-right revisionism in recent years. Still, remembering is not enough. As evidenced by my family’s unresolved quest to uncover the truth about my uncle—whose body has never been recovered and whose torturers and murderers have never been prosecuted—much remains to be done before this dark chapter in Brazilian history can truly be closed.

Frederico Freitas is a historian of Brazil and Argentina.