If Fernanda Torres Wins an Oscar It Could Save Actual Lives in Brazil
Over its long history, the Oscars has changed how society views gay rights with Philadelphia, war veterans with The Best Years of Our Lives, Holocaust history thanks to Schindler’s List, whistleblowers with On the Waterfront and Native Americans in Dances With Wolves.
Sunday’s ceremony could add a significant entry to that list — and one with potentially even more tangible impact.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
I’m Still Here — Walter Salles’ fact-based movie about a woman’s quiet resistance after her politician husband is disappeared by Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1971 — has been turbocharging political conversation in its home country since its release in the fall. If it wins a prize on March 2, the turn could help prompt the country’s liberal Supreme Court to come down on former leader Jair Bolsonaro and potentially even quash a revival of a far-right movement.
“The movie is already very unique in how it’s helped people understand the dangers of the threats to democracy in Brazil in a very personal way,” says Rafael Ioris, a Latin American expert at the University of Denver and author of the influential political history Transforming Brazil. “Were it to win an Oscar it could drive the conversation more and even be conducive to the Supreme Court making decisions against the far right.”
Star Fernanda Torres has a strong chance to win best actress, with I’m Still Here also a frontrunner to win international feature. And don’t entirely rule out the film sneaking high onto preferential ballots and staging the upset of all upsets to win best picture.
With some five million tickets sold, I’m Still Here is already the highest-grossing homegrown film in Brazil in more than five years. The period drama came in at a stunning second overall among live-action movies on Brazil’s 2024 box office chart, ahead of much more muscular Hollywood fare like Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Dune: Part Two. Playing the role of political widow Eunice Paiva, Torres has become a social-media sensation both in her home country and, increasingly, in the U.S. as well.
Seeing her push back against a totalitarian system when it victimizes her — after being part of a joyous lived-in family before that moment — has personalized the toll to Brazilians. One small victim has led to a giant leap in understanding.
“This story is something people can relate to in a whole different way than they have before,” says Bruna Santos, director of the Brazil institute at the independent Washington D.C. think thank The Wilson Center and former vice president of the National School of Public Administration in Brazil. “It’s just a mother trying to protect her family.” Young people in particular have sparked to the film, she says, the stories they knew mostly as textbook abstractions if at all now come to life via the kids and mom of the vibrant Paiva family.
The film’s effect on the perception of Brazil’s powerful military has been something of a virtuous circle: the political mood powers the popularity of the movie, and the movie in turn powers the political mood. And, potentially, powers change.
One of the biggest legal outcomes concerns the upcoming Supreme Court trial of former far-right president Bolsonaro. He and 33 military leaders have been charged by the country’s prosecutor-general of a coup to overthrow the government and attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law stemming from events on January 8, 2023 in which far-right supporters overran government buildings and engaged in other allegedly subversive acts in the hope of overturning Bolsonaro’s election loss to liberal candidate Lula da Silva. (Allegedly trying to poison their opponent, for starters.)
While the court will make its decision on legal grounds, Torres’ place in the spotlight and her willingness to speak out against right-wing agendas could intensify the political zeitgeist in ways that subtly inform the decision. And even without a hard legal consequence, the attention she draws could turn public opinion against Bolsonaro. That’s why Torres, many believe, holds the power to do more than become the first Brazilian to win a major Oscar. “It’s just an award but it’s also much more than an award,” Ioris says.
Bolsonaro is barred from running again until 2030, but at only age 69 now, he would hardly to be too old to hold office then. And experts believe that without a tough punishment meted out by the Supreme Court he or military leaders also could soon feel empowered to try to seize power illegally again.
“Right now in Brazil Bolsonaro’s supporters are estimated at between 20 percent and 30 percent of the national electorate,” Wálter Fanganiello Maierovitch, one of the country’s most famed jurists, wrote in an email in Portuguese to THR. “This shows the need to re-educate people on the importance of a democratic society. I’m Still Here helps people not forget the horrors of the dictatorship — a warning so that this history is never repeated.”
The 21-year rein of the so-called Fifth Republic that ended in 1985 is believed to have resulted in the torture of some 20,000 people, most of them guilty of nothing more than holding opposing political beliefs. At least 434 of them were killed, including Rubens Paiva, a liberal former Congressman and Eunice’s husband. (Selton Mello plays him in the film.) The period has cast a dark chapter over Brazilian life to this day.
It has also proved to hardly be the stuff of history, with hard-right leader Bolsonaro elected to office again six years ago. Over his four-year term he greatly increased the military’s presence in government, attacked democratic safeguards and weakened scientific and cultural institutions. The dark tenure culminated in the January 8 attacks that sought to negate the results of the election in the world’s seventh-most populated country.
The incidents contain echoes of the United States’ Capitol insurrection almost exactly two years earlier. (A planned screening of I’m Still Here for lawmakers on Capitol Hill Wednesday night underlines how its themes have resonated in the U.S.)
Those behind I’m Still Here say they didn’t really intend to comment on or influence the present. The film had been in development for some seven years (the memoir by Eunice’s son Marcelo on which the film is based came out in 2015), and filmmakers were surprised when news events this decade began to match their 1970s tale. “We thought this was a period movie,” Salles tells THR. “Then when the zeitgeist changed we realized this isn’t just about our past but about our present.”
Salles says Eunice Paiva’s decades-long legal efforts to gain clarity on her husband’s situation has served as a model for current changemakers. “Everything we talk about in the film stems from her belief in institutional channels, and it’s these institutional channels that are providing change now,” he says.
One big potential area of such change is Brazil’s Amnesty Law, the much-criticized 1979 statute that controversially gave immunity to those who committed crimes as part of the dictatorship. But a movement has emerged in recent years — now fueled by I’m Still Here — to repeal the law or at least interpret it a lot more narrowly to allow many to be prosecuted. Current Supreme Court justice Flávio Dino — a left-wing politician-turned-Justice — has cited the movie in these re-interpretation efforts.
As much as people who’ve never lived under a dictatorship struggle to understand why anyone in a country would want to go back to that, those who have warn not to underestimate the political and social complexity of the issue.
“Lula walks a fine line because the military holds a lot of influence and many people in the country — maybe even a majority — still believe in it and are skeptical of liberals who question it,” Santos says of the current situation. “The movie is a powerful tool to change that — it helps people understand why this issue is so important.”
While Americans see autocracy as a distant (or not-so-distant) apocalyptic scenario, Brazilians see it as something the pendulum could swing back to with surprising ease. The nation plummeted into it for two decades ending in 1985, flirted with it in the late 2010’s and early 2020’s and seemed in danger of tipping back into it in 2023. The difference between January 6 and January 8 is that the former is viewed as a horrifying one-off while the latter, perhaps more accurately, is seen as proof of democracy’s ongoing fragility — and of the need for constant and powerful cinematic reminders.
Still, the number of I’m Still Here tickets sold represents less than 3 percent of the Brazilian population, and while many setting the agenda have seen and been influenced by it, the vast majority of ordinary Brazilians have simply not watched the film. Santos says a sea change among those people will happen in other ways — possibly when a major modern telenovela is set during the time, attracting the genre’s audiences of tens of millions. (There have been some previous examples, including one show called Anores Rebeldes and another titled Senhora do Destino, but they date back more than 20 years.)
Some changes have already been put in place. In the wake of the film, Brazil’s National Council of Justice mandated that the state to be a lot more specific in the death certificates for those killed by the dictatorship. Viewers of the film will recall the vindication Eunice Paiva gets when she finally receives a death certificate 25 years later. But the government did not cop on the document to their role in his death.
Now, the Council says, that can’t stand, and those killed by the dictatorship must be recorded as such. Paiva’s certificate now reads that his death was “unnatural; violent; caused by the Brazilian state in the context of the systematic persecution of the people identified as political dissidents of the dictatorial regime established in 1964.”
The specific case of Paiva’s death has been reopened too. After five officers were charged around the time of the publication of Marcelo Paiva’s book, the case stalled In 2018 when Bolsonaro came to power. Three of the officers have since died but two are still alive. With the movie now a phenomenon, the case is back in front of the court.
The chance for Rubens Paiva to receive posthumous justice marks a stunning turn that many, least of all the Paiva family, ever thought they’d see – and a signal to Brazil and the free world that justice may be deferred but it is never dead.
In a striking note, a defense attorney for one of the officers has decried the movie’s role in reviving the case. “The case sat dormant for 10 years and suddenly an Oscar-nominated film comes out and the case moves again?” attorney Rodrigo Roca told the Brasilia-based newspaper Metrópoles. “The message Brazil sends internationally is that Brazilian institutions only work when someone is watching.”
Salles says he could only laugh when he heard this defense.
“I think that was telling,” says the director. “He doesn’t seem to understand the power a film can have. Doesn’t he realize that art is exactly what changes minds?”
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
Sign up for THR's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
