“I’m still here”

“I’M STILL HERE”

January the 8th 2025. My 66th birthday, second anniversary of the attempted coup in Brasilia, and the day that Zuckerberg decided to abandon fact-checking on his social media platforms, a decision celebrated by Eduardo Bolsonaro who in a moment of triumphant idiocy declared that now the Trumpist agenda has been fully legitimised, ‘many facts will be revised’ and the left will be finally vanquished. It is highly unlikely that he or any other right-wing extremist will have participated in the applause that greeted the announcement three days earlier of Fernanda Torres’ Golden Globe award for her performance in the Walter Salles film, Ainda Estou Aqui, “I’m still here.”  There are a number of reasons for this. First, such representatives of the end of history are largely uninterested in cinema that highlights State violence and social injustice. Second, the film deals directly with the consequences of the military dictatorship launched in 1964, a dictatorship that apologists deny ever really happened. The playbook is familiar. The tanks and soldiers on the street were a necessary security measure to rescue the country from diabolic communists, and as for rumours of torture, they are just malicious fictions with no foundation in truth. And so, the rewriting of history goes on. Daughter of Fernanda Montenegro, who starred in another iconic Salles film, Central do Brasil, Torres plays the wife of an engineer kidnapped and murdered by the military and who devotes the rest of her life to the struggle for human rights. A documentary drama based on the book by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, it is subtle in its evocation of the fear and terror that descended on Brasil for twenty years. Perhaps most important of all, it sends out a clear message about the fragility of democracy and the inherent dangers that lurk in the contemporary rise of far-right authoritarianism. When the secret police come, they can come for anyone, even a privileged upper middle class white family.