Analysis
I’m Still Here: How does it connect private experience with public history?
Walter Salles’s drama brings Brazil’s repressive apparatus into a home and a family. Reading its formal choices alongside the historical record helps us appreciate that perspective without mistaking fiction based on real events for documentary evidence.
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Ainda Estou Aqui (2024), known internationally as I’m Still Here, is a feature-length work of fiction directed by Walter Salles and written by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir. The film focuses on Eunice Paiva and her children after state agents arrest Rubens Paiva, a former federal congressman, in Rio de Janeiro in January 1971. The context is not an abstract dictatorship: Brazil’s National Truth Commission reconstructed the arrest and concluded that Rubens was tortured and died in custody, while his remains remained missing. The film turns that history into a family story. Its formal question is how to make public violence perceptible through the everyday lives of those left behind, without pretending that the camera alone can restore everything the state concealed.
First, distinguish the historical case from the film
The Venice Biennale’s listing identifies the film as a 2024 production directed by Salles, with a screenplay by Hauser and Lorega, cinematography by Adrian Teijido and editing by Affonso Gonçalves. It records a runtime of 135 minutes and its place in the 2024 edition’s competition. The Cinemateca Brasileira also catalogs it as a 2024 film. Sony Pictures presents it as a story based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir. These are identifying and production details, not certification that every scene reproduces events exactly as they happened.The distinction matters because the historical core is independently documented. The preliminary report of Brazil’s National Truth Commission, published in 2014, places Rubens Paiva’s arrest at his home on January 20, 1971, and his transfer to military facilities. It records testimony and documents concerning torture, the concealment of his whereabouts and his death in custody; its conclusions attribute knowledge of the torture to the head of the DOI of the First Army. The report’s own structure, which makes its sources and testimony explicit, is a reminder that an institutional reconstruction is not the same as transparent access to every moment of the past.
The film adapts a memoir and organizes events through performances, spaces, dialogue, ellipses and mise-en-scène. That makes it a fictional representation rooted in verifiable history, not an archival record of the arrest or an audiovisual transcript of every family member’s testimony. The most precise formulation is not “the film proves what happened,” but “the film offers a perspective on how enforced disappearance reorganizes family life.”
The house: from everyday openness to occupation
The Paiva home allows public events to intrude into a space the story has associated with family life. In introducing the film, Salles said he knew the family and that the house remained etched in his memory; the Venice Biennale’s listing frames his project as a story of the disappeared told from the perspective of those left behind. This documents the filmmaker’s relationship to the material and his stated approach, but it does not require us to accept the film as the direct memory of the entire family.A central sequence occurs when military agents enter the house and say that Rubens will be taken in for questioning. In a scene analysis published by The New York Times, Salles describes the contrast between domestic normality—the light, the sounds of the beach and the intimacy of the dialogue—and the intrusion. He explains that the camera follows the instability of the moment and that the couple’s goodbye is framed by the agents. The effect can be read as a spatial operation: the uniformed men are not a distant backdrop, but bodies that reorganize access, sightlines and the possibility of being alone. Intimacy does not disappear, but it is exposed to authority.
The screenplay published by Sony Pictures Classics provides a verifiable reference for another sequence: as Eunice and her daughter Eliana sit in silence facing the sea, the family gets into the car to leave the house; Veroca finds the Super 8 camera and films the home receding in a grainy image. As a production text, the screenplay makes it possible to verify this narrative structure; it does not replace the finished film or establish all its visual nuances. Even so, the scene marks a decisive change: first, home is a place to live in; then it is also something being lost, preserved only through a domestic image. The camera within the fiction does not automatically turn what it films into historical evidence: it records the house from the point of view of a family member.
What is known, what is left unsaid and what is interpreted
The story limits the information available to Eunice and her children. Rubens’s disappearance is not presented as a police mystery whose resolution depends on finding a decisive clue, but as violence sustained in part by a lack of information, the official version and the absence of a body. Viewers may understand the arrest as part of state repression, yet they share the family’s uncertainty about the detainee’s fate. Formally, this asymmetry prevents later historical knowledge from making transparent the experience of those who wait.The Truth Commission’s documentation helps keep two scales distinct. Historically, the report assembles testimony about torture and concludes that Rubens Paiva died in custody. Cinematically, the story selects what is seen and from whose perspective: following Eunice and her children shifts the focus from the machinery of repression to the life it interrupts. Ellipsis can make the lack of answers palpable; on its own, it is not proof of how a particular arrest unfolded.
This choice allows more than one reading. The interviewee and historian Fernando Seliprandy warns that family drama can partly depoliticize violence if it makes an apolitical victim figure more legible or acceptable and concentrates the dictatorship’s impact on the rupture of a privileged household. This observation does not invalidate Salles’s approach: it points to its limits and to what lies outside the frame. A particular family can make structural violence visible, but it cannot by itself represent the diversity of those persecuted or the different forms of opposition to the regime.
The family portrait: memory and survival, not proof
In another sequence, a press photograph of Eunice with her children turns an everyday act—posing—into a decision about representation. The Associated Press describes the moment when Eunice asks the children to smile despite their father’s absence. It can be interpreted as an assertion that the family continues to exist in the face of an attempt to erase it, and as an image that circulates beyond the walls of the home. But this symbolic reading belongs to analysis of the film; it does not, by itself, demonstrate how a particular historical photograph was made or what each family member’s actual intentions were.Here, photography and home movies serve a different function from the state report. They preserve gestures, relationships and traces of ordinary life, while the institutional record seeks to establish responsibility and circumstances through documents and testimony. An academic article by Patrícia Azambuja on photographic materiality in the film offers a useful framework for thinking about how images shape both the narrative and the emotional experience. Another academic study, by Igor Lacerda, explicitly situates the work within debates over memory, trauma and resistance. Both are critical interpretations; neither turns fictional shots into evidentiary archives.
Three periods are linked in this way: family life before the arrest, the uncertainty of disappearance and subsequent memory. Images do not restore the past intact; they give it form from the present of the narrative. The Venice Biennale’s listing notes that Salles understood Eunice’s story as a personal experience of loss and, at the same time, as a mirror of a national wound. This stated intention helps explain the project, but the film is not reducible to an illustration of the director’s words. Its form invites us to ask who preserves images, who can circulate testimony and which absences no image can repair.
What form contributes—and where its authority ends
The film brings public history closer to private experience by restricting the point of view, turning the house into a contested space and making photographs and home movies carry the memory of ordinary life. This approach produces emotional and narrative understanding: it helps us imagine how repressive policy invades relationships, routines and expectations. It should not be confused with the documentary knowledge that establishes dates, places, testimony and responsibility.It is therefore worth holding two questions at once. What does the film make perceptible through framing, sound, ellipses and the duration of its scenes? And which claims about Rubens Paiva, his arrest and his fate can be corroborated by independent sources? The first question belongs to film analysis; the second requires historical records. Keeping them in dialogue, without allowing one to replace the other, makes it possible to recognize both the power of fiction and its limits. Ainda Estou Aqui is not proof of the history it represents: it is a way of organizing a family memory in relation to documented historical events.
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Key takeaways
- Ainda Estou Aqui is a 2024 work of fiction directed by Walter Salles and adapted from Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir.
- The National Truth Commission documented Rubens Paiva’s arrest in January 1971 and concluded that he died in custody.
- The home, photography and home movie camera connect state violence with family experience, but they are narrative devices, not independent evidence.
- The family perspective illuminates a particular experience and also has limits: it cannot represent all victims or every form of resistance on its own.
- The film offers a cinematic interpretation of memory; factual corroboration requires independent historical documentation.
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