The Ghosts of Copacabana

Gisela Salim-Peyer explores the Oscar-nominated chronicle of one family’s encounter with military dictatorship in Brazil.

By Gisela Salim-PeyerMarch 1, 2025

• Film

• Politics

THE PLACE IS Rio de Janeiro, the year 1970, and Eunice Paiva’s peace doesn’t last very long. She floats in the waters of Copacabana, Rio’s resplendent peaks crowning her view, but the noise of an army helicopter interrupts her rest. The beating of the chopper is the sound of dictatorship: between 1964 and 1985, a military junta ruled Brazil with an iron fist, seizing upon the Cold War fear of communism to justify the violent excesses it visited upon the country. But how easy can it be to forget about injustice when life is good? The helicopter zooms away, and Eunice smiles again. On the beach in the distance, her tan children incarnate carefree Brazilian perfection, playing soccer and beach volleyball. A lost puppy arrives and charms Eunice’s youngest, Marcelo. “Can we keep him? Please?” Marcelo asks his dad, who resists unconvincingly, then quickly acquiesces. The numerous, prosperous Paiva family lives in a villa across the street from the Copacabana beach, a house where wamba is always playing and linen-clad intellectuals are always mingling. There’s plenty of room for a puppy. 

The dictatorship’s long shadow over the Paivas’ lives is the subject of I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui), a new film based on the homonymous 2015 memoir by Marcelo Paiva—that same puppy-loving boy on the beach. Walter Salles, Brazil’s most famous filmmaker, directs Fernanda Torres, one of Brazil’s most celebrated actresses, who just won Best Actress at the Golden Globes for her portrayal of Eunice. The film has united the country with Oscar hopes—it has secured nominations for Best International Feature, Best Actress, and Best Picture—but also chafed its historic wounds. Over the course of the dictatorship, the military tortured and disappeared thousands, including the Paiva family’s patriarch, Rubens. 

The Paivas’ plight was a common if tragic refrain across the region, where one country after the next descended into military dictatorship during the Cold War. Since the 1980s, as the dictatorships fell and democracy arrived, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, and others established truth commissions to acknowledge these legacies and provide reparations to their victims. (Argentina went as far as to prosecute its junta’s leader, an effort beautifully dramatized in the 2022 film Argentina, 1985, among others.) But Brazil was very much a latecomer to these reconciliation efforts: its own truth commission effort arrived decades later, in 2014. 

And yet, some of the population remembers the dictatorship not with shame but nostalgia. In 2018, the former army parachutist Jair Bolsonaro was elected president after a lifetime of public statements glorifying the regime. “The dictatorship’s mistake was to torture but not kill,” he told a radio station three years before getting elected. Around the time I’m Still Here began appearing in Brazilian theaters late last year, authorities released an investigation that accused Bolsonaro and members of an elite army unit of conspiring to stage a coup and kill his electoral opponent, the current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. 

I’m Still Here depicts the crimes of the military dictatorship in horrific detail even as it gestures to the reasons why someone might idealize the period. Amid stiff repression, the economy boomed; the “Years of Lead” coincided with the “Brazilian Miracle.” The Paivas themselves can find, in the architectural model of the even bigger home they’re planning to build, a distraction from the news that guerrillas have kidnapped the Swiss ambassador to pressure the government to release political prisoners. Eunice asks Rubens (Selton Mello) if their family friends are doing the right thing by fleeing to the United Kingdom, but her husband reassures her that they’re just a little paranoid. Even so, Eunice sends her oldest daughter, Vera (Valentina Herszage), off to London to stay with them for a while. That way, Vera can chase the Beatles and buy records instead of starting college in Brazil and getting involved with student politics. 

Eunice’s wariness proves prescient. One afternoon, the dictatorship knocks on the Paivas’ door. The children are so used to seeing people walk in and out of the house that they barely register the stern men escorting their father out. It’s just “a deposition,” Rubens tells his wife. “I’ll be back in time for the soufflé.” Eunice stays awake until dawn, waiting for her husband to return. He never does. In the morning, the police escort Eunice to what appears to be one of the dictatorship’s notorious torture centers. The corridors are gray and dull; screams echo off the walls. “Where is my husband?” she demands. But Eunice is there to answer questions, not to pose her own. The interrogator wants her to confirm that her husband left Brazil in 1964 to conspire with the insurgents fighting the dictatorship. “Rubens was a congressman,” she says. He didn’t flee, but rather was ousted from his position when the dictatorship came to power. He hadn’t been involved in politics since—at least as far as Eunice knows. The statement doesn’t satisfy the interrogator. Eunice spends the following days alone in a dark cell, until one night, her travail is over. An officer drives her back home. 

To a perfectionist, traditionalist woman like Eunice, preserving one’s composure is tantamount to preserving one’s dignity. When the world crumbles, restoring the appearance of normalcy becomes the highest imperative. Back home from jail, Eunice doesn’t greet her children until she scrubs the grime of detention from her body. Only in a button-up is she truly a mother. One of her daughters has been trying to find Rubens, but now that Eunice is home, the child must focus on school. Eunice will take it from here. She will figure out the family’s finances. She will be a loving mother, find time for discipline and joy, make it all look effortless. She will not lose her temper as she asks one of Rubens’s friends what her husband did to put her family in that situation, and, when she learns that Rubens had secretly delivered packages for revolutionaries, she will accept the explanation with grace. She will carry on cooking her famous soufflés. 

The second time we see Eunice catching a moment of respite in the ocean, one of her daughters calls her back to the sand. Rubens’s friend, a well-connected journalist, has some news. By coincidence, Eunice is wearing black as she hears that her husband was killed under unknown circumstances; on the following days, however, her clothing is comparatively colorful. She will not allow herself time for grief or funeral services. She will keep her wedding ring on and hide the truth from the children. The Paiva home, like the entire country, abides by a tacit rule of silence. 

Eunice comes to impose her own sort of political censorship. She turns off the radio when news of the Swiss ambassador comes up—the information is “not for children’s ears.” As she reads Vera’s letter from London out loud, Eunice edits out mentions of Rubens’s imprisonment. And, almost as though she’s internalized the logic of the regime, she enforces her censorship with violence: when one of the daughters defiantly reads the part of Vera’s letter Eunice skipped, her mother slaps her in the face. 

The irony is that Eunice does want her family’s plight to be seen and felt, just not inside her home. To challenge the regime that denies Rubens’s arrest, Eunice invites journalists to interview her. “We have to force them to admit it publicly,” she tells the reporters. Meanwhile, her children talk about the events only in whispers, only to each other. 

Gradually, the Paivas come to understand the life they know to be over. The dog Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira) found on the beach gets run over by a car—no one knows if it was an accident or if something more sinister transpired. Doubt seeps into the family’s life. The Copacabana villa loses its music and its gravitas. Military jets drown out the sound of the waves. Two agents set up shop in a parked car on the Paivas’ street to surveil the family’s every move. One day after lunch, Eunice announces that the family will not be building a bigger house after all. She has sold the property. They are to leave Rio and move to São Paulo. 

Flash forward to São Paulo in the mid-1990s. The dictatorship has ended; the children are grown. A more wrinkled Eunice got a law degree and now teaches at a university. It took her 25 years, but she eventually received an acknowledgment of the regime’s wrongdoing, albeit tepid and bureaucratic: the government has finally issued Rubens’s death certificate. Reporters circle Eunice after she picks up the document from the civil registry.

“After the return of democracy,” one of them asks, “doesn’t the government have more urgent issues than fixing the past?” 

“No,” Eunice says, smiling. 

Back in her São Paulo apartment, where she toasts whiskey with her two youngest, the mood is jovial. In whispers, the siblings discuss with each other the instant they understood their father would never come back. For one, it was the moment when the Rio house was empty; for the other, when his clothes were donated. Eunice approaches, and the siblings hastily change the subject. Even under democracy, the dictatorship’s silence lingers. 

What remains? What is lost to silence, time, memory? Rubens’s remains are never returned; he is never buried. I’m Still Here asks if it’s really possible to move on. After the state kidnapped her husband, Eunice is still here, holding her family together. And though neither Eunice nor the audience sees Rubens again, he, too, is still here, his absence a constant presence. 

The film ends in 2014, when an elderly Eunice (played by Fernanda Torres’s real-life mother, Fernanda Montenegro) has started to succumb to Alzheimer’s. Eunice is surrounded by her children and grandchildren, in a big house full of laughter and good food, much like the one they lost to the dictatorship. A reporter on TV mentions the execution of congressman Rubens Paiva and others at the hands of the military. Eunice, in a flash of lucidity, smiles at this recognition. She must take comfort where she can. Brazil may never do enough to atone for its sins; Rubens’s killers may never be punished. As Eunice loses her memory, the entire nation must decide how it will deal with its own.