With Searing Political Drama ‘I'm Still Here,' Walter Salles Delivers an Urgent Warning: ‘A Country Without Memory Is a Country Without a Future'

There was something about the Paiva family's house that Walter Salles never forgot. It was a few blocks from the beach in Rio de Janeiro. The doors and gates were always unlocked, the windows open to let in sunlight and ocean breezes. It was filled with music and dancing, parties and people, debates and ideas. But that all changed in 1971 when Rubens Paiva, a former leftist congressman turned engineer, was hauled away by the police or the military (it wasn't initially clear) to be interrogated, tortured and, eventually, murdered. That left his wife Eunice and their five children to pick up the pieces and search for answers something in short supply since Brazil was seven years into a military dictatorship that would last for 14 more.

"There was such a vitality to the house. It was a place we all wanted to drift through," says Salles, who was a teenager when he would visit the family. "Then one day when we went by, it was completely closed and there was police guarding it. You can imagine the shock."

Salles grew up to become one of Brazil's greatest filmmakers, spending much of his career dramatizing his country's slow, often slouching, move towards democracy in films like "Central Station." But "I'm Still Here," which documents that harrowing period in the lives of the Paivas, may be his most personal yet, as it deals with people he grew up knowing so intimately. What he's pulled off is nothing short of a triumph, as well as an urgent reminder of the dangers of authoritarianism. The film debuted to raves at the Venice Film Festival, with critics citing Fernanda Torres' performance as Eunice as Oscar-worthy. It screens at this year's Toronto Film Festival before Sony Pictures Classics releases the movie domestically this fall.

Though the movie deals with an explosive subject matter, Salles took an understated approach to the production. He resisted in close-ups, push-ins or other camera moves that would have heightened the tension in a melodramatic way. "I wasn't trying to amplify emotions," he says. "I wanted to be truthful."

And he takes time getting to Rubens' disappearance, following the parents and the kids over summer days spent on the beach, evenings at the ice cream shop and social occasions where Eunice's famous soufflés were in demand. "You had to allow the life to breathe in," Salles says. "In the beginning, I want to invite you to be sensorially in a family."

The goal was to make it clear how much joy was snuffed out when Rubens was "disappeared." To help the actors get into the proper emotional state, he shot the picture chronologically. It was a logistical nightmare for a movie shot on location, since shifts in weather or availability often necessitate filming things out of sequence. "It allowed me to get into my character's skin," says Torres. "You had this sunny part of the movie with children and parties and friends. Then it's all taken away and you are filled with this sense of loss. I felt like I, Fernanda, had experienced that."

Salles encouraged Torres to underplay Eunice's grief and anxiety, reminding her that her character needs to keep it together for the sake of her young children. "She remains in silence," Torres says. "She cannot just panic. She doesn't have time for self-pity. But there's something profound about her actions. When something violent was happening to her, she stayed calm. She smiled. She didn't show she was suffering."

The Paivas begin the film comfortably middle class, but Rubens' disappearance plunges them into economic uncertainty. Without a death certificate (something Brazilian authorities took decades to grant the family), Eunice had no access to her family's money and was forced to sell everything and start over. She went back to school and became a human rights attorney.

"Her journey blended with the journey of Brazil as it sought to redefine itself," Salles says.

That journey continued during the seven tumultuous years that Salles labored on the script and then in cobbling together the film. It was a period that saw Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing aspiring strongman, win the presidency, only to lose office in a tight contest four years later against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In scenes eerily reminiscent of the Jan. 6 riots, Bolsonaro's supporters stormed Brazilian government buildings, radicalized by his claims of election fraud.

"We started this project thinking that we were retelling a story from the past, but we came to realize that it was also a reflection on our present," Salles says. "We have to remind ourselves of what happened. Cinema can be a powerful instrument to push against those forces - to help us avoid oblivion. A country without memory is a country without a future. "