I’m Still Here, Walter Salles’ first dramatic feature in more than a decade, homes in on a familial tragedy that, in its time and place, was part of an insidious larger pattern. The film begins in 1971, in Rio De Janeiro’s Leblon neighborhood, and introduces us to the Paiva family, whose home is always warmly bustling with the restlessness of its five children. Its patriarch, Rubens (Selton Mello), is a former congressman turned civil engineer. Its matriarch, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), is a stylish, doting homemaker. The family is very closely knit: when its eldest daughter, Vera (Valentina Herszage), goes away to college in the U.K., she sends some home videos she’s taken that are supplemented with a “script” someone in the family is tasked with reading as they giddily watch from the living room, for instance. But we immediately worry about the Paivas, given how much Rubens has publicly opposed the current political regime. 

At the start of I’m Still Here, Brazil is nearly a decade into a military dictatorship. Its increasing aggression is encapsulated early on when Vera and some friends are coming home from a showing of Blowup (1966) and are invasively stopped and frisked, with little explanation, by a contingent of military police. A family photo shoot on the beach is turned ominous by the many dark military trucks that zoom by in the span of a few seconds. There’s been an uptick of Rubens-requesting phone calls from an anonymous, gruff-voiced man that will abruptly drop if he isn’t home.

Read the full review at 425.