I'm Still Here(2024)
dir. Walter Salles
A mother refuses to let Brazil forget her husband.
Where to watch: Netflix (page flagged leaving in 9 days as of 2026-11-06); rent $3.99 Amazon/Apple TV/Fandango At Home; buy $12.99 (JustWatch US, checked 2026-11-06, re-check). Verify.Letterboxd ↗
Rio de Janeiro, 1971, under Brazil's military dictatorship. Rubens Paiva, a former congressman, is taken from his family's beachfront house by plainclothes men and never comes back. His wife Eunice, a mother of five, is detained and interrogated, then spends decades searching for the truth, and eventually becomes a lawyer and an activist. Based on the memoir by their son Marcelo Rubens Paiva, and a winner of the Oscar for Best International Feature.
Why it’s here
It's a film about how a state erases a person and the long labor of making it admit it. What's punk is Eunice, a housewife who refuses to disappear her husband a second time. What's pedagogical is the scale: the horror is quiet, the family keeps going, and the memory fight takes fifty years. Pairs with The Secret Agent (2025) and The Jakarta Method, and ties to the Brazil Dispatches post. Note: PG-13; interrogation scenes and threat, little on-screen violence. Portuguese with subtitles; a dramatization of a family memoir. Walter Salles also directed The Motorcycle Diaries, already in the catalog.
Where This Film Lives
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
Between Shades of Gray
Ruta Sepetys
A Lithuanian teen draws her way through Siberia.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Orchard of Lost Souls
Nadifa Mohamed
Three women in Hargeisa before the bombs fell.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Zahra's Paradise
Amir & Khalil
A mother searches for her missing son in Tehran.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
A Girl Is a Body of Water
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
A Ugandan girl asks who the women before her were.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Beauty Is a Wound
Eka Kurniawan
Indonesia's century, told by a woman back from death.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Fatelessness
Imre Kertész
A boy in Auschwitz, narrating it politely.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Fruit of the Drunken Tree
Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Two girls, one gated house, and Escobar outside.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Gate of the Sun
Elias Khoury
A doctor tells a coma patient the Nakba.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST