Screenplay by Murilo Hauser & Heitor Lorega & Directed by Walter Salles
Based on the Book I’m Still Here by Marcelo Rubens Paiva

Rating: ★★★★★

Stories are our inheritance, passed down like whispers through time, reshaped by each hand that holds them. Even when history hushes them, they endure—etched in memory, in art, in those brave enough to listen. My father, a journalist who lived through Brazil’s shadowed years, handed me his lens, and I wonder if my love for words grew from his. Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here feels like peering through that lens again—a tender unraveling of the past that lingers in the present.

We’re swept to Rio de Janeiro in the early 1970s, where a dictatorship’s grip tightened through vanishings and silence. The director is known for Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, has always danced between the personal and the political, but here he steps closer, cradling history like a fragile keepsake. The visuals bloom like faded photographs—sepia sunlight spilling over muted pastels, a cigarette curling smoke in an ashtray, typewriter keys clacking with defiance. Shot with a grainy intimacy—perhaps 16mm, perhaps a digital echo—it blurs memory into something you can touch.

Sound weaves its own spell. Warren Ellis’s score hums beneath, a mournful thread of strings stitching through radio static, protest songs muffled by glass, the soft rustle of censored pages. Every note, every echo feels alive, as if the air itself remembers. Rio unfolds in dual tones: shadows pool in cramped rooms where secrets are traded, then spill into streets awash with golden light—alive with lovers, rebels, a city straining against its chains. In one quiet scene, a projector flickers with faces of the lost, and you feel the weight of their absence.

Legacy threads through it all. Fernanda Torres, Oscar-nominated for this role, shares the screen with her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, their presence a living echo of Central Station. It’s a lineage I feel too—my father’s stories stirring in me as I watch. Yet this isn’t just about the past; it’s about what we carry forward. Rio itself holds memory—sun-drenched, shadowed, pulsing with life yet hollowed by loss.

I’m Still Here is more than a film—it’s a testament to why we remember. Stories don’t fade; they live in us, in the body, in the blood. Walter Salles doesn’t just tell one—he reminds us we’re part of it, too. In its silences, its songs, it speaks.

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures