Walter Salles’s “I Am Still Here” and the Choices We Must Make Since We Too are Still Here 

Last month, I saw the film I Am Still Here directed by Walter Salles, written by a dynamic trio including: Murilo Hauser, Heitor Lorega, and Marcelo Rubens Paiva (Son of Eunice and Rubens Paiva). I am Still Here is about Marcelo’s parents during the tumultuous 1970’s in Brazil at what seems like just the middle of a military dictatorship. The film highlights the actions by the administration of the Military dictatorship, the experience of supporters of liberation: Eunice and Rubens, and the long-term effects of moments of fascist upsurges. 

The military dictatorship began “April 1st 1964 after a coup d’état by the Brazilian Armed Forces, with support from the United States government against president João Goulart.” It lasted until 1985. Goulart was one of the last left-wing presidents of Brazil known during his time as Minister of Labor to work in favor of workers’ demands. While many in elected office at the time refused meetings with working class and poor Brazilian workers while also using their position to siphon public resources for their own greed, Goulart worked to put into place regulations to create a social safety net. 

 The military dictatorship comes at a time in which the U.S. is in the middle of a cold war against what it sees as the threat of communism. Imagine, Bay of pigs happens in 1961. 1962 Kennedy asks Goluart to participate in an invasion of Cuba, to which he says no and two years later, proponents in the military take over the country. 

The film picks up in the 1970’s when forced disappearances are a regular element of a fascist Brazilian society. But what happens once the opening salvo of Fascism has already happened and continues to exist for 20 years, most likely longer than anyone in the 1960’s foresaw. As is human nature, fascism just continues to exist in the background and many become normalized. The film has additional hidden questions including most importantly; Do we all just move on and forget about the initial things we did to openly fight it? Are we still fighting it today with the same level of vigor?

The film plunged me into thinking more about the current time, place and conditions in the US. and while this review weaves in and out of the current mass deportation threat mandated by President elect Donald Trump, there are many more articles in my head of how closely the film also speaks about the time, place and conditions in the U.S. under democratic administrations as well. I can’t help but think about how in South Central LA many of us, including myself under democratic mayors and city council members, have become accustomed to the forced disappearances created by the prison re-enslavement complex. I think about how at the same time that the LAPD budget has raised more than 100% over the last 20 years, so has the Black population decreased due to their tactics of brutalization and incarceration-forced. 

Deportation in the U.S., on stolen land, is a renewed enactment of a very old tactic of forced disappearances (the very subject of this film) by a modern-day fascist government. In fact, the entire carceral system brings into the 21st century an awkwardly legalized mechanism of forced disappearance, in which elected bodies, and institutions alike are almost forced to accept the normality of this system in order to receive resources to continue to exist. As your grandma most certainly told you of the casserole she baked, that you love, but with onions that you hate, “oh don’t worry baby, you won’t even know they’re in there!” 

While many Hollywood films highlight the disappeared person as the centerpiece of their story and end it there, this immensely emotional journey actually focuses on the loved ones of the disappeared, and in doing so makes their disappearance, and its long-term effects the centerpiece of the film. 

When the film picks up in the 1970s former congressman Rubens Paiva is now working as an architect and simply enjoying time with his big, beautiful family and at least to his and many of their friends’ knowledge many of the things he and friends have done to fight fascism is not known to the military government, or so they think.  

Oh, but don’t you just hate how the surveillance state always has a way of rearing its nasty head when you least expect it?  

All of the good times that Reuben and his wife Eunice and children have are set to the short but intense background moments of fascist military trucks holding soldiers rolling down the street, in which everyone holds their breath for just that second, hoping that they don’t hit the brakes and jump out to set their attacks on you. This happens to the Pavia family as they’re on the beach celebrating their daughter’s birthday. Thankfully, the trucks are just rolling down the street this time. 

As many of my elders migrated to the U.S. from Belize in the early 1970’s, today when Trump threatens to challenge birthright citizenship, I and many Belizean Garifuna folks can relate to the feeling of holding our breaths. How far will the challenge go? We don’t know, but we work around in our minds that there is no way that they can challenge our citizenship from 30 years ago. But how long were people in Brazil expecting the dictatorship to last? 

The golden piece of this film however is the unknowing organizer that plays the lead role in the film, Eunice Paiva, wife and mother. When the military dictatorship finally does metaphorically hit the brakes right in front of the Paiva household, Eunice, is radicalized into action as she juggles both keeping her family calm, cool, and collected, while doing all that she can to let her rage out through going to speak to all family friends in a means to insurrect the fascist state. 

As is the case with forced disappearances, members of the army, who are dressed in civilian clothes ask Reuben to come with them and refuse to answer the question of where he is being taken or why he is being taken away. 

But as a filmmaker, if you’re planning to speak about the circumstances of the disappearance, we have to see what happens inside the place of incarceration during the time of a person’s disappearance. The filmmakers, however don’t ever again show us what happens to Reuben, but after he is gone for some time, Eunice is then taken away as well. 

What ensues is a horrible experience where she is forced to put on a black hood, is thrown into a cell, and wakes up day after day for what seems like an eternity and is asked to point out people she knows in an album. What happens is even more sinister than I was ready to confront. When on the first day she speeds through the album and refuses to identify any person, each day, a new person’s picture is added in a sinister threat to that person’s identity both in real life, but also in Eunice’s psychology. Each day she is then forced to point to someone she loves as a means to try to break her spirit, but she never gives them any information that can be used against anyone. In what seems to me like a move to realize that they will not break her spirit, they finally release her back to her home to be reunited with her children.

Eunice then goes on a long journey to prove that the state illegally disappeared her husband and broke up a family after faintly hearing Reuben’s scream as she is walked out of the once abandoned facility that the military has repurposed into an incarceration and interrogation center. 

But only 20+ years later after her own interrogation of family and friends and continuous new ideas of tactics to try, when her children have grown up, and after the military dictatorship is long over, does she and two children get a death certificate and documentation confirming the actions of the military.

In many Hollywood films, that would be the end of the film, but in this case it’s not. We are forced to live past this point as is she, hence the name of the film; I Am Still Here. 

We see a family gathering scene long past this point in which she is nearly despondent and ailing with dementia, when she is almost jolted out of her wheelchair for 2 mins as the documentary on TV speaks about the disappearance of her husband and her fight against it as just one element of the long ended military dictatorship. 

The film comes at a pivotal time in which we must also ask ourselves what will we do when the fascists come knocking on our door? As Trump begins the slow but arduous process of figuring out how to nationalize ICE as a national military force, beginning with his superfluous goal of mass deportation, we must ask ourselves, are we going to, like the Pavia family hold our breaths on the beach and hope they don’t hit the brakes and turn in our direction, or will we fight like Eunice was eventually forced to?

Imagine what it takes for the brakes to be hit on you. You may think that in fact it’s only for leaders of movements on the level of a Dr. King or Malcolm X, but in fact, the film demonstrates that they come for supporters as well. The only reason Reubens was forcibly disappeared was for his role in helping to pass along letters to families of those who had been taken. 

In the end, when the film director reminds us of the Paiva family’s humanity by showing a slideshow of pictures of the “good times” we, everyone in the theater, cried because we knew and know what’s ahead for us all and that it doesn’t matter what happens to us. In the end Reubens did what he could to help no matter the consequences, and we must do the same. 

While many of us have normalized forced disappearances into the daily lived experience of the U.S. only to be shoved out of that delusion by the Trump Administration, Walter Salles calls on us to reflect on the long-term effects of Fascism by taking us on the full trajectory of what is included in a force disappearance, that we, in the case of this film cannot ignore or look away from.

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