It took Walter Salles twelve years to return to narrative filmmaking and sixteen to be back in his home country of Brazil, but I’m Still Here is worth the wait. As I write this, the director has just made history by helming the first-ever Brazilian film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. The drama also landed nominations for Best International Film and Best Actress for Fernanda Torres, who recently became the first Brazilian actor to win a Golden Globe for her luminous performance as Eunice Paiva, a woman who reinvents herself after an unthinkable loss to become a human rights lawyer and fierce activist of the anti-military dictatorship movement.

The momentous feat feels poignantly timely as the film, which chronicles one of the most harrowing cases in the history of Brazil’s dictatorship, was released in its country of origin mere days before far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro was implicated in a criminal plot led by of an elite army unit to assassinate president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. I’m Still Here takes viewers to Rio de Janeiro at the height of the regime—which began in 1964 with a coup d’état against president João Goulart by the country’s armed forces—to tell the story of the forced disappearance and subsequent murder of former congressman Rubens Paiva through the strength and determination of his widow, Eunice, and the couple’s five children. Bolsonaro once spat on a bust of Paiva, calling the once politician a “communist” and a “bum.”

It’s no surprise that I’m Still Here has been so widely embraced on Letterboxd, with countless beautiful responses to Salles’ ode to collective memory shared by from all around the world—starting at home. “In dark times, the memory of something good in the past can serve as a beacon of hope. When the credits rolled, sobs and tears came with it through each person who shared such a deep pain with the Paiva family,” writes DamRibeiro in Portuguese, with Isabella adding, “I’ve experienced it as if it had happened to me, a knot in the heart and in the throat. Dictatorship never again.”

Walter, so many of your films concern movement, young people on the road, and notions of freedom. Here, you have this anchor in the shape of the house. How did having that unit ground the film?

Walter Salles: This film is about the interior movement of that one character, Eunice. We are talking about the story through the microcosm of a family that had a dream of a future that was severed by an authoritarian regime. Then, there was this woman who reinvented herself—the movement to do that from within is extraordinary. In Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, you travel in distance. The transformation is in the distance, as you bump into a physical geography the character is unaware of. In I’m Still Here, it’s about this character who has to reinvent a present—and a future—for herself that she is also unaware of. They are all journeys of discovery. 

Fernanda Torres: This film is also about traveling: time traveling. Walter wanted to go back to that house, which he visited so often in his childhood. It was something so personal, and I always found it beautiful that he opened that house again through cinema to invite us inside and to see that house with him.

Fernanda, how did shooting the film chronologically affect your process of embodying Eunice?

FT: There was a possibility of doing the prison scenes first, but Walter always said no. He always said, “There is no other way to make this movie but chronologically.” It’s funny, because it really helped me. The day I saw Selton saying goodbye, I looked at him and said, “I’m really going to miss my friend,” because we are friends. I felt lonely when he left. That house was such a wonderful place to shoot, to be able to go to that set in my city every day… And then, one day, it was like I was kidnapped from that place to go to this awful prison. When I returned to the house, I was a different person. To have that experience as an actress—and not only for me but all actors in the film—was like having a mirror to the experience of the characters. It helped a lot in of building this sense of honesty and truth in the movie.

For all of us in that space, it felt as if we had 300 pounds on our backs. Yet, we had to get out of that and return to the house with the knowledge of what had happened in the prison. It altered everything about how we shot the film from that moment on. Again, doing the film chronologically and experiencing what happens at the beginning, rehearsing it without the cameras, allowed us to find the texture of the film and between the characters. Every kid had a personal connection to the space, which I find so important in cinema.

FT: Another thing I find very special about the prison scenes is that Walter didn’t choose dumb actors. The actor who interviews me in the prison is so intelligent that you become afraid of him. Sometimes we portray those who partook in the military dictatorship as brutal and non-intelligent but not here and, as a result, I was really scared.

Many films about the dictatorship also tap into Westernized expectations of suffering, but you have 32 beautiful minutes of beach and sand and sun and a tangible sense of joy, which you find again in the film’s final act. How did you first envision this three-act seesawing between joy and sorrow?

WS: The film was about relaying the fact the family carried within themselves the dream of a country that was somehow severed by the military coup d’etat. The light at the beginning was very important, because this is the story of a family robbed of that joy. You had to sense it to be able to understand the magnitude of how Eunice not only reinvents herself but relays that to the next generation. This is why we have that third act with the family gathering. There is something almost Italian about it: Eunice was Italian, so perhaps there is something to be said about the transmittance of a perception of life. I love it when someone comes out of the film and says they felt the pain of those characters, but also felt energized by the film because it has a lot to do with the book and the family itself.

You have incredible Brazilian music throughout the film, including Erasmo Carlos’s ‘É Preciso Dar Um Jeito Meu Amigo,’ a song that came out during the dictatorship and is largely political, but also about finding a way to move on. And then you have the peerless Warren Ellis penning the score, an Australian composer whose cultural references are so far away from Brazil. Can you tell me a little bit more about that mix?

WS: That generation of composers and musicians were at the root of Tropicália, and Tropicália is the result of musicians like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil being imprisoned and having to live in exile. They were in London, blending samba with the electric guitar, and that is employed at the beginning of the film in all those song choices from that period. Our editor, Affonso Gonçalves, was also an extraordinary resource, he’s a great interlocutor. I really wanted to have Tom Zé at the beginning, but Erasmo Carlos was Affonso’s idea and they blended so well. Warren Ellis also brought the possibility of a dialogue between the Brazilian musical currents and another sensibility. This conversation is also at the heart of Tropicália. It was about finding the same spirit of the movement 40 years later, and Warren was an extraordinary companion. 

FT: Erasmo Carlos is a very precious choice because Erasmo Carlos is not Tropicália. He writes romantic music but he is the intellectual side of Roberto Carlos [one of the most popular Brazilian musicians of all time.] He is always very philosophical in his songs but is seen as a popular composer and singer, so I think he brings to the Paiva family a very basic feeling of joy and romanticism but also a kind of depth.

Erasmo comes back at the end credits, which are a beautiful manifestation of the idea of endings as beginnings, too. When did the idea for it first come to you?

WS: We usually abandon the credits to a different team, but I love the idea that it should have a narrative quality and echo the film as a whole. Every single shot should contain the film as a whole, and the credits should, too. We shot the scenes of the empty house with the idea that they could be used during the last part of the narrative, but they felt somehow reminiscent of a Danish painter who was on my mind a lot while we were filming, Vilhelm Hammershøi. His paintings are about absence, and he is perhaps the artist who best articulated absence, of something that was in an image, is no longer there, but you can still sense it. That house, to me, was always a character in the film and, as we say goodbye to the story and the film, we also say goodbye to the house.

You’re talking about classic paintings, and Eunice also references a classic form of art in Greek theater and tragic figures like Antigone and Penelope. Fernanda, how did you navigate the relationship to the classic tragic archetypes in your performance?

FT: My mother told a phrase about Hecuba [a tragic queen within Greek mythology] that was with me from the beginning: “You cannot play Hecuba like you would a normal melodrama, because tragedy is not a degree of existence.” This was really clear with Eunice. She remains silent after the loss of Rubens because she does not want to the burden of this tragedy to her children. She wanted them to have a kind of innocence, in a way, which is very tough because each one of them had to kill their father at different moments of their lives. She had to withstand the pain alone, and this is a tragedy. You are not allowed to have self-pity and you understand that the utopian life you had doesn’t exist anymore. That is what tragic heroines face and they have to endure and go on.

While I was playing Eunice, there was more than one time when I had to leave after a scene and cry because it was so heavy to carry that burden with self-control, with a smile… It’s something I had never dealt with with a character before and it allowed me to explore much deeper emotions as an actor than I would have in a normal melodrama. My mother… My god, she has a lot of great phrases, and one of them is that, in modern plays, especially American plays, if someone calls a good shrink then the dramatic problem is solved. That’s how she differentiated a chronicle play from an existential one.

WS: The whole film, but especially Fernanda’s construction of Eunice, is based on the idea of subtraction. To subtract to the point when you are just left with the essence of things. I think what Fernanda does is walk this tightrope—a little like at the end of Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, where someone walks between two buildings in ruins—and it’s such a fine equilibrium. She found that fine-tuning. This is how you can say a lot with very little, and it somehow elevates the whole film. I always say that she obliged us to be better than we are.