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The journey of an Oscar-nominated film is a long one. Often premiering at film festivals, its voyage starts almost a year before the actual ceremony and months before the lengthy awards season kicks off. But it is one that Walter Salles, the director of Best Picture nominee I'm Still Here, is familiar with – at least in theory.
"I've lived it with Motorcycle Diaries and Central Station, so twice before, and it was, I have to confess, much simpler," he tells us when we catch up on the week of the 2024 BAFTAs. "I did a week here, a week there, and then things just happened and the word 'campaign' was never mentioned. There was no such thing as a campaign. Now, everybody asks, 'How's the campaign going?'"
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Of course, for Salles, this process has been even longer than most, beginning technically way back in his childhood in the '60s. At the time, he lived in Brazil and spent evenings and weekends with the real family that inspired this heartbreaking and powerful biographical drama.
The film tells the story of the Paiva family, whose father disappeared during Brazil's military dictatorship. Rubens Paiva, a former congressman, was arrested in 1970 and never seen again after he was tortured and killed. Charting 44 years, it follows Rubens' wife Eunice Paiva's fight to find out the truth of what happened to her husband and expose censorship around his murder.
It is based on Eunice and Rubens' son Marcelo Rubens Paiva's 2015 memoir of the same name, and it was incredibly important for Salles to keep him and the entire family closely involved in the making of the film. "He was not only reconstructing the memory of his family during three decades, he was also reconstructing part of Brazil in hidden memory during that past," the director explains. "So we asked him to keep close to the development, as much as he could."
Salles' approach was meticulous, working on the movie for much of the 12 years since his previous feature film, 2012's On the Road. In this time he conducted extensive research and interviews, including with the rest of the Paiva family. "We stayed very close with his four sisters as well, because [Marcelo] was 11 when the story starts, and therefore his rendering of it is beautifully impressionistic," he explains. "It's from the eyes of an 11-year-old and so it was very important to hear also what his older sisters felt at that specific time."
Key focus
Despite their involvement, it's not the children who are the heart of Salles' rendering but Eunice, Rubens' wife, who holds her family together during the unthinkable tragedy. She's played magnificently by Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres, who is a frontrunner in the Oscars' Best Actress race, and Salles says seeing the real Eunice Paiva brought to life by the star was very moving.
"The real Eunice that I got to meet was a woman of an extraordinary inner strength, but at the same time so restrained," Salles says. "And a woman that didn't want to become well known at the beginning of the story, she's a mother of five, and then somehow destiny makes her face something that she completely didn't expect to and this is when she rose to become who she ended up becoming."
Salles says Eunice wanted to rise above her family's tragedy in a non-melodramatic way. "She started to articulate forms of resistance that are completely unique, original, and yet brilliant, and ended up eroding that authoritarian regime in its own manner," he recalls of her approach.
There's a particular moment in the film that shows Eunice's refusal to cower in the face of tragedy. She's being interviewed by a newspaper who wants to take her family's photo. They all pose, smiling for the camera, when the journalist suggests they look a bit more somber. "No, we'll smile," she tells him. It's based on a very famous photo of the real family, and Salles says it was incredibly important to him to include details like this in his adaptation.
"We were all in awe of the fiber of that woman who, faced with what the journalists and, ultimately the government, wanted her to represent – that is, a broken family – refuses that and actually offers the opposite, which is the collective smile of that family."
Torres understood this side of Paiva completely. "Fernanda, with her emotional intelligence, she's so bright but also she's so sensitive that she understood that less was more with that character."
He adds: "There was a kind of a transmutation in this to the point where I have a difficulty now to dissociate Fernanda Torres and Eunice Paiva. For me, they are somehow the blend of two very potent women who end up fighting for the same principles. It's very beautiful to see that."
Widespread acclaim
It's a film that's been embraced all over the world, with Salles open about how moving it has been to hear from audiences about their personal connection to the story. "The most beautiful gift that we sometimes get from the viewers is when somebody comes to you and says, 'Oh, I didn't have the impression I saw a film, I had the impression that I lived with that family for the length of the film,'" he smiles.
"Ultimately, this kind of [response] brings me back to my adolescence, when I was in the house at the heart of the film due to the personal connection that I have with the family. I felt invited to be part of that family and somehow I tried to, in doing the film, extend an invitation for everyone to be part of that family."
It's not just audiences either, as some of Salles' peers have become open champions of the drama too. Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón named it as one of his favorite films of 2024, and Salles says Paris, Texas director Wim Wenders drove two hours in the snow to introduce the film in Germany.
"Filmmakers such as Alfonso Cuarón or Wim Wenders, or Guillermo del Toro, two days ago, Alejandro Iñárritu, wonderful filmmaker and artist from Italy Valeria Golino, Sean Penn, Alexander Payne, all these guys, they have given us wings because ultimately, we are a small independent film from Brazil."
For Salles, these gestures of support have helped the film be seen widely, and also buoyed him along in the lengthy process of launching I'm Still Here – and the director is particularly poetic about the journey it's been. "I think that launching a film has a lot to do with entering an ocean. You enter the ocean, but you're not absolutely sure where the currents are going to lead you," he smiles.
"It's a story that we couldn't have told some time ago due to censorship and now we can. So how beautiful is that – to be able to tell a story that is so particularly from that one specific place, that has a very Brazilian sensibility to it, and yet it can echo in different parts of the world. That's definitely why we do cinema."
I'm Still Here is out now in UK cinemas from February 21 and US theaters now. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
You can also read our awards coverage with our list of the 2025 Oscar nominees and our latest 2025 Oscar predictions.
