I’m Still Here
Repression & Remembrance in Brazil

2,263 words

While Trump’s style continues to dazzle and seemingly lay waste the leftists, both in America and abroad, a recent film has captivated the critics and the box office, dealing, as it does, with political repression.

But is it that one-sided? As Monica Wood said in her novel My Only Story, people are more than just one thing.

Walter Salle’s film I’m Still Here (Portuguese: Ainda Estou Aqui) opens on the splendid beach of Rio. It’s 1970, and everyone’s having a great time. Kids from the Paiva family are excited as only kids on the beach can be. But in the water offshore, Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), the mother of this brood of four, swims quietly and stealthily, mostly below the water, at peace in her own solitude and down time. But she hears what we hear: a mechanical chopping. She bobs her head above water and stares at an army helicopter flying low over the beach. Her stare is strong and wary.

What would the Brazilian army want above the beach of Rio? Well, there is a crisis. Communist insurrectionists, ignored by many and an annoyance to many more, have just kidnapped the Swiss ambassador to get a hostage release. There is growing instability in Brazil, and in Latin America that generally means the military gets interested very fast and very hard.

After all, in Latin America, the spiritual guide for a republic isn’t George Washington but Napoleon. In some constitutions, the army is guaranteed a right to intervene in order to preserve public order.

But life goes on, and there’s a lot of it for the Paiva family. Rubens (Selton Mello) and Eunice have four children, and they’re bubbly, impulsive, and exciting. It’s a happy family enjoying bourgeois life in Brazil. Rubens is a civil planner, a former congressman, and a caring father. Everyone is excited over the oldest daughter Vera (Valentina Herszage) going to study in London. She’s obsessed with the Beatles, and cajoles Eunice into letting her borrow a favorite winter coat for the soggy weather of Old Blighty.

Rubens is leftist, and after political turmoil in 1964, he gave up his political life. Between scenes of the children’s romping and Eunice trying to keep them under control, it’s apparent Rubens is involved with expatriates outside the country. Friends of his urge him to leave the country. Rubens is attentive but careful. He says this will blow over. But Brazil is uneasy. After all, while America might argue about Che Guevara, his abortive revolution in Bolivia was almost next door.

A family celebration on the beach is happy, but Eunice frowns at army trucks carrying troops through the street. Vera and some of her pals go out to see a movie, toking in the car, and come to a tunnel road block set up by MPs. Everyone is searched.

Eunice tries to figure things out and talks to Rubens. He says not to worry, and they have a big send-off for Vera. A bookseller friend, in a whispered voice, hints Rubens should join her.

In January, 1971, the military raids the house, represented by soft-spoken but clearly wary men in civilian clothes. Rubens is taken away. Eunice springs into action. When given silence on his whereabouts, she makes public inquiries. For this she and Eliana, her second oldest daughter, are taken away, hoods pulled over their heads, and Eunice undergoes twelve days of arrest and brutal psychological torture. She is told over and over to look through mug shots and point out people. In the endless rows of photos, she sees friends with whom she used to go to parties. Dragged out again, she finds her photo has joined the mug shots.

Released, Eunice begins a never-ending struggle like a Brazilian Antigone to find out what happened to Rubens when the government refuses to comment. Eunice’s battle becomes the heart of the film as she keeps up the fight to find out about Rubens.

But this isn’t just a one-sided political drama. What impressed me the most was its depiction of a family at war with a repressive system. The kids go on with their lives, albeit with the sombre cloud of Ruben’s disappearance. The family cuts corners. Eunice moves them to Sao Paulo to be with her parents. A steady battle continues against a silent government as Eunice gets a law degree, she becomes an expert in Indigenous Rights in Brazil. The Paivas carry on.

When a newspaper wants to photograph them for an article, the reporter asks the family look glum. Eunice asks why. Because it will make a better story. But Eunice insists everyone smile. They always smile. They’re a family is this is what they are, the media be damned.

Eunice’s struggle is never without interest. She quietly defies the government, demanding to know what happened to Rubens.

The is a generational struggle, and the film ends decades later at a family reunion. Eunice is now aged, silent, suffering from Alzheimers while her children, now grown up, talk and mix around her. They have their lives, but continue as a family. When a program on TV mentions a recent investigation into the death of Rubens (in 1985, the government finally admits Rubens is dead, but refuses to prosecute anyone, nor will produce a body), an almost catatonic Eunice blinks at the screen and almost smiles. Rubens is still there.

The power of this film is subtle. It’s great strength, aside from Eunice (and Torre’s performance), is showing the fortitude of the family in both resisting oppression and surviving and thriving in contrast to political repression. Life goes on for the Paiva family, and we’re reminded how united they are in solidarity and in the memories of parent and child. A strong weapon against tyranny.

It’s noteworthy that in 1985, Anthony Burgess’s study of Orwell, he states one of the few failures of the novel was its solitary hero, Winston Smith. Burgess felt that had Smith and Julia created a family, a stronger, more generic resistance to Big Brother would have been possible. After all, Smith’s memories of his mother and family, sketchy as they were, formed the nucleus of his beginning rebellion against Oceanian mores and its version (or perversion) of society and history.

The question of sympathy for Eunice Paiva and her family is raised by a post on the VNN movie thread by Lutador Branco, a Brazilian who recalls this era as a fierce struggle between communism and…well…middle class order if not “democracy” (what a weasel word that is these days), and in 1964, communists in Brazil were countered by a strong anti-communist movement, even including housewives marching in the streets banging pans. It was this time that Rubens Paiva was a congressman in Brazil. As Branco posts:

The only type of violence I witnessed during this period was seeing a police officer chasing a criminal and shooting him in the foot, so as not to kill him. The violence this film portrays only happened to criminals and communists. The vast population lived very well and supported the dictatorship. The main rule of the Brazilian military was: don’t be a communist. Only a small percentage of people were communists and urban and rural guerrillas, and the dictatorship cracked down on them. But the vast majority of people lived well, with health, food, good jobs, money, good homes, leisure and freedom.

In the film there is no indication that Brazil is an agonized, suffering society. It is a middle-class, contented world where Rubens and Eunice bring up their children. Rubens’ crisis happens out of sight, next door, and is ignored for the most part, which makes the repression all the more unsettling.

The American Hollywood version of this kind of film is the 1982 Missing, the Costa-Gavras film dealing with the disappearance of an American journalist in the 1973 coup in Chile. It follows the usual plot device of an American father refusing to believe his government has anything to do with “disappearances” of the political opponents of a regime supported by us, until he finally becomes aware in a horrible way. Perhaps a flaw with this film is its Hollywood approach of using big name actors (Jack Lemmon, Cissy Spacek), whose screen celebrity get in the way of the story and situation.

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Since we’re mourning the loss of Gene Hackman, it might be good to recall the 1983 movie Under Fire, dealing with the 1970’s revolution in Nicaragua, where Nick Nolte is a tough war correspondent favoring the Sandinistas and Hackman his boss, whose trusting in the military to follow the rules respecting journalists leads to his untimely end. Also, these movies center on Americans becoming involved. The locals are ignored, and in I’m Still Here, I enjoyed seeing the locals given full attention.

The 1988 film A World Apart, starring Barbara Hershey, covers much of the same ground as I’m Still Here except it deals with South Africa, especially through the eyes of Joe Slovo and Ruth First (Hershey), both communists working with the ANC to end apartheid, much of this seen through the eyes of their son. There is political activism, parties at home mixing blacks and whites (the boy spies black men necking with white women), and I was cold to the film. I’m not fond of communists, and the police disruption of this family is minor compared to that of the Paivas. Then, one considers the aftermath of both worlds. Brazil returned to democracy, and is a stable part of the world, where South Africa, after the “victory” ending apartheid, has become a basket case of economic decline, crime, a not-so-subtle slaughter of white farmers, and open cries to “Kill the Boer.” The country is falling apart, thanks to reds like Slovo and First, many of whom celebrated their victory, then promptly flew to London to escape the results of their murderous justice. Even Roger Ebert, a warm supporter of ending apartheid, complained that most films about South Africa kept dealing with apartheid and said nothing of the post-apartheid world.

One can’t really blame them, though. As William Pierce remarked, the elections in South Africa showed a white population willingly voting themselves out of existence. So, we can watch the political situation on film and sense we might not be getting both sides of the picture. There was a communist movement in Brazil that certainly wished to overturn the capitalist system, and the government, unlike the church-going Boers and English middle-class, were not about to join the wastebasket of history.

When I wrote The Green Path, my first novel, I was caught up in the Central-American wars in the 1970’s, and used repression in Guatemala as a major theme. It was very brutal, and I included a subplot of the Civil War in Missouri, where Bushwhackers, after a thwarted attack on a Union garrison, kill German settlers. I wanted to show how political passions and repressions are a universal theme. It’s similar to the review Alex Linder at VNN wrote of the film Ride With the Devil (VNN, 26 Feb., 2004), where Jake Roedel (Toby Maguire), a German-American, joins the Bushwhackers in resisting Union control of Missouri. Linder complains of stereotypes in American culture that ignore a vast assortment of white groups, especially German-Americans:

Too often in pop culture we get the tiresome chirpy cheery peppy Irish type. Nothing wrong with this type, it’s just that fuck the Irish. There are other people who like to see themselves represented once in a while. How seldom is anyone of the background of Germans like Roedel portrayed. Almost never.

But the power of I’m Still Here still resonates with the quiet, steady defiance of Eunice. Lutador Branco, while disagreeing with the political tone of the film, admitted he liked it very much. It’s also good to see a movie about Brazilian society. For many on the right who keep dumping on Brazil as a land full of muds, the population is still majority white, and in I’m Still Here, we see a white, middle-class world; from its pleasures and family stability to the era’s adulation of the Beatles. If there are those who do not consider Brazil “white” enough, that’s their problem. For the record, Brazil was more than welcoming to many Nazis and German nationalists who settled in colonies in the country and were left alone, as were similar colonies of post-Civil War era Confederates who refused to go back to a South under Union domination. We should think better of Brazil.

The film’s release sparked some heated discussion in Brazil by the right and left, the former arguing the film attacks needed measures taken to save the country, the left arguing (as do I) that if you have enemies in your country, kidnapping them, killing them and dumping their bodies in unmarked graves or dropping them into the ocean are horrible ways of solving the problem.

When I saw the film my first thoughts weren’t of fascists or communists, but of January 6, 2021. Dissidents then were arrested, hunted down, persecuted, and even now there seems to be little interest in open investigations or rooting out those in government responsible for this, but things may quickly change. Would that there was an American movie about the subterfuge and repression of Trump supporters after January 6. Mel Gibson, are you listening?

Dealing with political repression is always an uncomfortable but necessary subject, as is the human character that springs up to resist, challenge, and remember the victims, especially if they are your kin. In this, I’m Still Here is a strong, compelling film that crosses all barriers.