News

All roads in the Brazilian film industry seem to lead to lead to Marcelo Rubens Paiva, and he considers many of the people he has worked with in the last 40-odd years of his life to be family. By coincidence, family is also the subject of the film that has changed his life dramatically over the last six months. Based on Paiva’s 2015 autobiography Ainda estou aqui, Walter Salles’ film I’m Still Here tells the story of his mother, Eunice Paiva, whose politically active husband Rubens was taken by military police in January 1971 and never returned home.

Paiva is no stranger to drama, having overcome tetraplegia after diving into a shallow lake at the age of 20, an incident that informed his first bestseller, Feliz Ano Velho (Aka Happy Old Year) in 1983. But he admits to being overwhelmed by the international goodwill that has followed I’m Still Here since its world...

Chicago – Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com appears on “The Morning Mess” with Dan Baker for Wbgr-fm on January 30th, 2025, reviewing “I’m Still Here,” nominated for Best Picture at the 2025 Oscars. In select theaters now, with a wider release on February 14th.

Rueben Paiva (Selton Mello) was a congressman in Brazil who was exiled following a military coup in 1964 (the military dictatorship lasted until 1985) and comes back to Rio de Janiero in 1970 with wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and his five children, although he maintains underground anti-government activities. These activities eventually get him arrested in January of 1971, and Eunice’s pursuit of information results in her (and her daughter’s) detention. Rueben’s disappearance remains officially unsolved, prompting Eunice to move her family and gain her law degree, to pursue the truth for both Rueben and other underrepresented peoples. Even as Rueben’s death is made official, the sun never sets on hard line government oppression.

This review was originally published on October 26, 2024 as a part of our Middleburg Film Festival coverage.

I’m Still Here, Walter Salles’ latest film, is all about the profoundness of feeling in an unstable, tumultuous time, and how it rocks the boat of a seemingly stable family. The Brazilian film is a family drama wrapped in a political story. It’s focused primarily on Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) and her five children after her husband, Rubens (Selton Mello) — a former congressman who was ousted when the Brazilian Military Dictatorship took over — is disappeared in 1971. Written by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, I’m Still Here is an evocative, nuanced portrait of family and the lasting imprint of politics.

I'm Still Here is set during the early 1970s military dictatorship in Brazil, focusing on the Paiva family. As the regime intensifies, Rubens, Eunice, and their five children live in an open house by the beach in Rio.

Established via a coup in 1964, the Fifth Brazilian Republic had been in place for close to seven years when government officials showed up at the house of Rubens Paiva. He had been a former Congressman who’d been vocal about the regime change back in the day, but Paiva was out of politics now and working as an engineer in Rio de Janeiro. Still, the men had some questions for him in regard to leftist groups who may or may not have been involved with a recent kidnapping. They asked...

The dizzying part of living under an authoritarian regime is how it makes the very act of caretaking feel like a radical act. When maintaining a home in the face of encroaching fear and paranoia, surveillance and retaliation become emblems of opposition. Yet the mere appearance of normalcy can often also feel indistinguishable from capitulation.

There are traces of something genuinely exploratory in Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, the director’s first fiction feature in 12 years and certainly one of his most personal. Based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s 2015 memoir, the film traces the effects that the 1971 state-sanctioned kidnapping and murder of the author’s father, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), have on his immediate family, especially his beleaguered wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), who was partially unaware of Rubens’s political dissidence. In the background, the gears of the Brazilian military dictatorship grind ever onward, and there are continuous suggestions of vaster, more clandestine intrigue. The film’s perspective, though, remains firmly aligned with Eunice’s.

Salles knew the Paiva clan personally, having befriended middle daughter Nalu (portrayed here by Bárbara Luz) as an adolescent in Rio de Janeiro. The family’s household, where much of I’m Still Here takes place, is rendered with...

The Motorcycle Diaries director Walter Salles developed I’m Still Here for seven years before it premiered as part of Venice’s Main Competition this year. That brings us closer to the time when a book of the same name was first published in Brazil: I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui), the 2015 memoir of Marcelo Rubens Paiva. Marcelo is the son of Rubens Paiva, an ex-Congressman whose opposition to the Brazilian military dictatorship resulted in exile in 1964 until, in 1971, he was made to disappear. Salles, who knew the Paiva family personally, centers his film around that traumatic event as experienced by Eunice (Fernanda Torres), wife of Rubens and a mother of five.

In the film, Brazil’s military dictatorship is felt but kept at the periphery of the frame. As the opening shot shows Eunice swimming in the ocean, Rio’s blue skies are momentarily pierced by a helicopter flying over.

Walter Salles’ 1998 international breakthrough, Central Station, earned an Oscar nomination for the magnificent Fernanda Montenegro. Now in her 90s, the actress turns up toward the end of the director’s first feature in his native Brazil in 16 years, the shattering I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui), in a role that requires her to speak only through her expressive eyes. What makes the connection even more poignant is that she appears as the elderly, infirm version of the protagonist — a woman of quiet strength and resistance played by Montenegro’s daughter, Fernanda Torres, with extraordinary grace and dignity in the face of emotional suffering.

Many powerful films have been made about the 21 years of military dictatorship in Brazil, from 1964 through 1985, just as they have about similar oppressive regimes in neighboring South American countries like Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. The human rights abuses of systematic torture, murder and forced disappearances represent an...

Walter Salles’ deeply poignant “I’m Still Here,” the Brazilian director’s return to his homeland and to the filmmaking form that yielded his Oscar-nominated “Central Station,” begins where maybe every movie set in Rio de Janeiro should: at the beach. A stray dog disturbs a game of volleyball. Girls dab Coca-cola onto their skin as tanning lotion. Little kids play football and flirty teens trade gossip about pop stars and boys they like. In the sparkling water, Eunice Paiva (a stunning turn from Salles regular Fernanda Torres) floats on her back, squinting against the sun. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. But there is a helicopter.

It is Christmastime in 1970 and Brazil is six years deep into the military dictatorship that would last for another 15. But on a day like this, amongst people like the Paiva family – Eunice, her engineer husband Rubens (Selton Mello) their five volleyball-playing, Coke-tanning,...

A good deal more restrained and nuanced than The Craft and Carrie, Raquel 1:1 takes itself perhaps a little too seriously, presenting a rather straightforward tale of a repressed young woman living in a small town where everything is simple if you have faith. Starting over with her dad Hermes (Emilio de Mello), Raquel (Valentina Herszage) moves across Brazil to an old family home. Once there, Raquel—who considers herself religious even if she doesn’t regularly practice—encounters Laura (Eduarda Samara) and Ana (Priscila Bittencourt), who invite her to be part of the local church. Ana’s mother Elisa (Lianna Matheus) is the local pastor who gives daily, fiery sermons as Ana leads the youth outreach and group activities.

While spying on Laura and Ana swimming, Raquel finds herself drawn to a brick shack in the middle of the woods which becomes central to the story’s supernatural elements...

In Raquel 1:1, Valentina Herszage stars as Raquel, a teenager in Brazil who moves to a small town with her father after a haunting tragedy. Her religiousness leads her to becomes close with a group of girls from the evangelical church, though her profound faith and unexplained experiences quickly transforms her into an extremely divisive […]

The post 2022 SXSW Film Festival Interview: Director Mariana Bastos and Star Valentina Herszage on ‘Raquel 1:1’ (Exclusive) appeared first on Shockya.com.

Religious fanaticism, parental trauma, and misogyny from within and without are all up for dissection in director Mariana Bastos’s fascinating genre-tinged drama, Raquel 1:1. The only Brazilian feature in the SXSW lineup, Raquel 1:1 is a fascinating look at one young girl’s struggle to find her way in a rural town overwhelmed by religious orthodoxy. Simple inquiries turn her into a pariah and change the entire dynamic of the town around her, but is it for the better? For the first time in a while, Raquel (Valentina Herszage) is living with her father Hermes (Emílio de Mello) following the tragic, violent loss of her mother. Struggling to find a way to put it behind them, Hermes moves them back to his hometown, a rural religious...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Being a teenager is difficult enough when there isn’t a serial killer on the loose. Not making things easier in “Kill Me Please” is the fact that, for 15-year-old Bia (Valentina Herszage), the recent string of murders is perversely fascinating — the kind of thing she’d post on Facebook or like on Instagram, not least because one of the victims bears a striking resemblance to her.

Read More:‘Tulip Fever’ Review: This Bizarre, Long-Delayed Historical Romance Was Not Worth the Wait

A kind of “Virgin Homicides,” Anita Rocha da Silveira’s debut feature takes place in a well-to-do Rio de Janeiro struggling to understand the violence that’s invaded its neighborhood. Bia and her three besties talk about boys, parties, and the ghost that may or may not haunt their school — all of it ubiquitous yet unknowable. Bia’s conception of such adolescent milestones has been so filtered through...

"Remember what the pastor said: 'Blood is life.'" Cinema Slate has revealed an official Us trailer for an indie horror film from Brazil titled Kill Me Please (also just Mate-me por favor in Portuguese). The film is about a group of high school girls who waste their days wandering through the neighbor of Barra da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro. When a series of murders begins to "terrorize the neighborhood" they develop a morbid curiosity with the victims, leading them to some dangerous places. Starring Valentina Herszage, Júlia Roliz, Mariana Oliveira, and Dora Freind as the four leading ladies. Kill Me Please is "partly inspired by the 1980s teen slasher genre" and is described as a "disturbing and funny dive into teenage sexuality, spirituality, loneliness and fragility." This actually looks damn good, I'm looking forward to checking it out. Here's the official trailer (+ posters) for Anita Rocha da Silveira's Kill Me Please,...

After stopping by festivals such as SXSW, Venice, and New Directors/New Films, Anita Rocha da Silveira’s Kill Me Please will finally be hitting U.S. theaters next month. The Brazilian coming-of-age meets slow-burning horror film follows a group of high school girls who start to become obsessed with the victims of recent murders in their area. Ahead of a release, a new trailer has now landed.

“With its inky, stalking sense of darkness and warped surrealism, David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. is an obvious touchstone for Silveira’s sensibility, but her visual milieu feels just as evocative of disparate directors such as Carlos Reygadas, Céline Sciamma, and Harmony Korine,” we said in our review. “Her camerawork doesn’t so much follow as glide, and Silveira isn’t shy about starbursts of color (e.g. a refracting neon purple prism from a headlight). The sequences are carefully composed but not immune to playful tricks,...

Following in a wave of cerebral psychological horror films such as The Witch, It Follows, and The Babadook, Anita Rocha da Silveira’s debut Kill Me Please is the latest art-horror film that’s concerned with the internal repercussions of trauma. But unlike that series of films, Kill Me Please may be more effectively identified as a film about the end of the world.

Set in Rio de Janeiro’s paranoia-soaked Barra de Tijuca, it follows a series of tight-knit high-school girls against the backdrop of a series of young women’s murders. The murdered women are mostly anonymous, but their deaths loom over these girls like present-day, sexually charged ghost stories. These women all worry that each day will be their last, unable to stop a perpetual personal apocalypse.

And while this premise has the possibility to feel gratuitous, it remains grounded thanks to a perspective that always places the girls’ lives first.

BehemothAs more prominent film festivals gear up for spring, a smaller though by no means slighter affair begins in New York. New Directors/New Films, curated by Museum of the Modern Art and Film Society of Lincoln Center, unfurls its carefully considered program of 27 features and 10 shorts, with its premise and draw on emerging voices in cinema. Indeed, the festival may very well be a last stop for filmmakers on the rise before they are introduced to wider audiences. Nd/Nf has brought us in the recent past Fort Buchanan and Diary of a Teenage Girl, and longer ago films by Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Chantal Akerman. Most of this year’s selection has premiered at festivals, many have been covered by this very site, and all are compelling. Here are several highlights.***With a narrative rooted loosely on Dante’s Divine Comedy, Zhao Liang’s documentary Behemoth depicts the...

The sensorial cinema of Gabriel Mascaro, who turned the life of a group of cowhands into a poetic experience in Neon Bull (Boi Neon), was the big winner at the 17th edition of Rio de Janeiro’s International Film Festival.

The allegory of the recent economic transformations in Brazil received four Redentor awards on Tuesday night: best film, best screenplay, best cinematography and best supporting actress for Alyne Santana.

Previously the film screened in Venice, where it won the Orizzonti special jury prize, and Toronto.

The best director prize was shared between Ives Rosenfeld’s Hopefuls (Aspirantes), a journey of a young amateur football player, and Anita Rocha da Silveira’s Kill Me Please (Mate-Me Por Favor), a teen horror film set at a school in Barra de Tijuca. Both works are first features.

The jury headed by the director and cinematographer Walter Carvalho also celebrated Hopefuls with a best actor prize for Ariclenes Barroso and a...