The Brazilian drama I'm Still Here has won the Academy Award for best international feature, a first for the South American country.
The film is based on a true story set in 1970s Rio de Janeiro, when Brazil was living under a military dictatorship.
Actress Fernanda Torres was also nominated for an Oscar for her leading role as Eunice Paiva. Her husband, Rubens Paiva, had been a congressman before the U.S.-backed coup d'etat in 1964. After he was abducted by military operatives in 1971 and never returned, Paiva was left to care for their five children as she sought justice for her husband. As a lawyer and activist, she helped indigenous people in the Amazon too.
"This goes to a woman who, after a loss suffered during an authoritarian regime, decided not to bend and to resist," director Walter Salles said while accepting the award on Sunday. "Her name is Eunice Paiva."
He also dedicated the film to "the two extraordinary women who gave life to [Eunice Paiva]. Fernanda Torres and Fernanda Montenegro."
I'm Still Here also features Torres' real-life legendary mother, 95-year-old Fernanda Montenegro, who plays an older version of Paiva in the film. Montenegro was nominated for best lead actress at the Oscars in 1998.
I'm Still Here was adapted from the 2015 autobiographical novel, Ainda Estou Aqui, by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the couple's only son. The journalist, novelist and screenwriter collaborated on the film with director Walter Salles, known for his previous films, the Oscar-nominated Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries.
Salles, who knew the Paiva family growing up in Rio, says the film was a reconstruction of their memories and of the entire country. "It's an extraordinary book that allowed us to offer this reconstruction of this history that we thought was pretty much a reflection of our past," Salles said on CNN. He added that while making I'm Still Here, he realized "it was also a film about our present."
When Torres accepted the Golden Globe award for best actress in January, she said, "with so much fear, this is a film that helps us to think how to survive in tough times like these."
In Brazil, the film broke decades-old box office records and prompted a partial reckoning for the nation that endured a brutal dictatorship for more than two decades, until 1985. It's been showing in theaters at the same time that former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro was charged with allegedly attempting to overturn the country's 2022 election. The charges came months after a federal police report accused Bolsonaro of an attempt to poison former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and "violently dismantle the constitutional state."
Some activists are demanding death certificates of those killed during the military dictatorship, which is what Eunice Paiva was able to get for her husband. And they want the officers responsible for his death to be tried. In protesting outside the Rio home of one of those former officers last week, protestors chanted the title of the film in Portuguese: "Ainda Estou Aqui."
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