by James Mottram
Walter Salles, the Brazilian director behind such revered films as Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, is back.
It’s been a dozen years since his last feature film, his take on Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic On the Road. In the interim, he’s made documentaries – including one on the Brazilian soccer star Sócrates. He has also written movie scripts, but nothing quite landed. “Somehow, when I got to the end of those screenplays, the reality they were depicting didn’t reflect the whole picture anymore,” he explains when we meet in London. “The country, the national identity, was in flux; changing at a velocity I couldn’t fathom.”
Finally, he settled on I’m Still Here, a title that feels self-referential, like a reminder that one of the world’s great filmmakers has not gone away. “There is an interesting line by Duke Ellington,” he muses. “Duke Ellington says to be a musician, the most important thing is to listen. And when you stop listening to yourself or listening to others, you’re not a musician anymore. I think that when I opted to do this story, I was truly listening to myself. I was trying to follow Duke, understanding that there are times where you really have to go back to the source and see what you absolutely want to tell.”
In this case, it was a highly personal story that took the 68-year-old Salles back to his childhood and, somehow, also reflects on the state of the world today. Adapted from the 2015 book Ainda Estou Aqui, I’m Still Here is set in the early 1970s and follows the Paiva family, parents Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and Rubens (Selton Mello), and their five children. “I wanted to tell this story because it somehow was engraved in my memory, because of the personal relationship I had with the family. I met the family when I was 13, I met the five kids of the Paiva family as I was coming back to Brazil after five years living abroad.”
Salles, whose own father was a diplomat, had spent his early years in Paris, but when he returned with his parents to Brazil, he no longer recognised the country, which was now under a military dictatorship. He was introduced to the Paiva children through a mutual friend. “We somehow migrated towards that house because it was so much more lively than our own house. There were no barriers between kids and adults, adolescents and adults.” Politics was always up for discussion. “There was something very vivid and very immediate about the experience of being in that house that I never forgot.”
In looking to the past, was Salles also reflecting on Brazil’s political landscape over the past few years, with the recent rise to power of right-wing nationalist Jair Bolsonaro? “It was really the possibility to offer a reflection of our youth, a reflection of that military regime,” he answers. “I wanted to do a film about [that]. But as we were developing the project, the country steered to the extreme right, and it suddenly became a film also about our present.”
While Bolsonaro is no longer President of Brazil, Salles adds that the film grew in meaning as they were developing it. “All of us who were doing the film – actors and crew – we understood that this had to do with our past, but that somehow it also had the echo of the present, this story that embodied the personal journey of a family, but also the collective journey of a country echoing into the present. And that made it become really necessary. So, we said, ‘Okay, yeah, let’s shoot this’.”
I’m Still Here turns on the fact that Rubens, a political dissident, is arrested by the authorities. When he doesn’t return, the fearless Eunice goes in search of him. “The moment where the father is taken away from that family, that defined a ‘before and after’ in our lives, the lives of the kids from my generation who were in that house,” explains Salles. “Because whatever was left of our innocence, we lost it at that very moment.” Nevertheless, it was only when he read the 2015 book, written by Eunice and Rubens’ son Marcelo Paiva, that Salles “understood that there were much more layers to that story that I could fathom”.
Since the film premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, where it won the Silver Lion for Best Screenplay, I’m Still Here has been embraced by critics and audiences alike. Nominated for a BAFTA and two Golden Globes, winning Torres the Best Actress prize in the latter awards, it will compete in early March at the Oscars. Again, Torres will compete in the Best Actress race, while the film is nominated for both Best Picture and Best Foreign Language film. Given the controversy surrounding one-time favourite Emilia Pérez, it could yet sneak it.
While Salles is evidently delighted for Torres, an actress he first worked with on 1995’s Foreign Land, the film also allowed him to reunite with Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who became the first Brazilian nominated for a Best Actress Oscar when she starred in Salles’ Central Station (Torres is now the second, with her Academy Award nod). In a poignant grace note, Montenegro plays Eunice when she’s much older and suffering from Alzheimer’s [in below image in wheelchair].
“To have both actresses in the same film, playing the same character… it gave the impression that somehow different films I had done in the past were merging into one. And interestingly, it wasn’t a road movie anymore. I’ve done many road movies, and I think that the journey now was within. It was an interior journey. And a journey in time as well. The journey of The Motorcycle Diaries covers 12,000 miles, but the journey in I’m Still Here covers forty years of that family’s life. So, it was about how to really portray the personal and the collective through the microcosm of family.”
So, what is Salles up to next? Will we need to wait another twelve years? “Again, I’m going to defer to Duke Ellington’s idea that you have to listen to yourself,” he smiles. Only now, thanks to festival screenings and audience Q&As is he beginning to understand what he’s done with I’m Still Here. “That informs what you will want to do a little bit further on. So, at this stage, I am reading books that I’m attracted to, but I’m not thinking of adapting them, at least for now, because my mind is really focused on something else.” Whatever that may be, it’s heartening to know that Salles is still here.
I’m Still Here is in cinemas 27 February 2025
