‘I’m Still Here’ Director Credits Fernanda Torres, Real-Life Inspiration in Brazil’s First International Feature Win
Brazil has won its first Oscar for international feature for I’m Still Here, the story of a family broken apart amid a dictatorship. Notably, the feature edged out France’s Emilia Pérez, which took home multiple Oscars earlier in the evening.
Director Walter Salles credited the woman who inspired the film — Eunice Paiva — and the women who brought her to life, daughter-mother pair Fernanda Torres and Fernanda Montenegro.
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“This goes for a woman who, after a loss suffered during an authoritarian regime, decided not to bend — and to resist. So this prize goes to her. Her name is Eunice Paiva,” Salles said to massive applause, including from star Torres.
I’m Still Here, also nominated for best picture, tells the real-life story of a mother of five children who reinvents herself as a lawyer and activist after the devastating disappearance of her political dissident husband at the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship.
Brazil was previously nominated five times, while Salles himself was nominated for Central Station (1998).
“Many powerful films have been made about the 21 years of military dictatorship in Brazil, from 1964 through 1985, just as they have about similar oppressive regimes in neighboring South American countries like Chile, Argentina and Uruguay,” THR‘s review of the film noted. “The human rights abuses of systematic torture, murder and forced disappearances represent an open wound on the psyches of those nations, for which cinema has often served as a vessel for collective memory. It’s not often, however, that the spirit of protest against the horrors of junta rule is viewed through such an intimate lens as I’m Still Here.”
In the best international feature Oscar race, I’m Still Here competed with Latvia’s animated Flow from director Gints Zilbalodis, the story of a flood-displaced cat that must team up with other animals in search of survival and a new home; Denmark’s Magnus von Horn-directed black-and-white historical thriller The Girl With the Needle; France’s entry Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard’s Netflix genre mash-up that is a transgender coming-of-age story as much as a Mexican crime thriller musical; and Germany’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, the Iran-set drama from exiled director Mohammad Rasoulof.
A total of 85 countries had submitted features for the best international feature film Oscar this time around.
The 97th Academy Awards were hosted by Conan O’Brien at the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood. See the star-studded Oscars red carpet 2025 arrivals and the full winners list here.
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