They got here for Rubens Paiva one Wednesday lunchtime in January 1971, barging into his beachfront house in Rio and carting him off – to the place no person knew.
“I didn’t have even the slightest concept what was going to occur. Much much less that my sister and my mom can be arrested the following day. It was a terrifying feeling,” recalled the engineer and politician’s son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, who was 11 on the time.
After a brief however frightful keep in a torture centre run by Brazil’s army dictatorship, Pavia’s feminine family members had been launched. But his 41-year-old father would by no means return. Authorities solely acknowledged his homicide 25 years later, when a dying certificates was issued. Paiva’s stays had been by no means discovered.
The abduction and homicide of Rubens Paiva – some of the infamous crimes of the 1964-85 regime – is retold in a brand new field workplace hit by the Golden Globe-winning film-maker Walter Salles, whose forged contains the grande dame of Brazilian cinema, Fernanda Montenegro.
I’m Still Here, which relies on a guide by Marcelo Rubens Paiva of the identical title, has struck a chord in a rustic nonetheless wrestling with the legacy and political penalties of its 21-year dictatorship. Nearly 2 million folks have watched it at cinemas since its launch in early November. Paiva’s 2015 guide has shot up lists of bestsellers.
Quick Guide
Brazil’s dictatorship 1964-1985
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How did it start?
Brazil’s leftist president, João Goulart, was toppled in a coup in April 1964. General Humberto Castelo Branco turned chief, political events had been banned, and the nation was plunged into 21 years of army rule.
The repression intensified underneath Castelo Branco’s hardline successor, Artur da Costa e Silva, who took energy in 1967. He was chargeable for a infamous decree known as AI-5 that gave him vast ranging dictatorial powers and kicked off the so-called “anos de chumbo” (years of lead), a bleak interval of tyranny and violence which might final till 1974.
What occurred through the dictatorship?
Supporters of Brazil’s 1964-1985 army regime – together with Jair Bolsonaro – credit score it with bringing safety and stability to the South American nation and masterminding a decade-long financial “miracle”.
It additionally pushed forward with a number of pharaonic infrastructure initiatives together with the nonetheless unfinished Trans-Amazonian freeway and the eight-mile bridge throughout Rio’s Guanabara bay.
But the regime, whereas much less notoriously violent than these in Argentina and Chile, was additionally chargeable for murdering or killing tons of of its opponents and imprisoning hundreds extra. Among these jailed and tortured had been Brazil’s first feminine president, Dilma Rousseff, then a leftwing insurgent.
It was additionally a interval of extreme censorship. Some of Brazil’s best-loved musicians – together with Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso – went into exile in Europe, writing songs about their enforced departures.
How did it finish?
Political exiles started returning to Brazil in 1979 after an amnesty legislation was handed that started to pave the way in which for the return of democracy.
But the pro-democracy “Diretas Já” (Direct elections now!) motion solely hit its stride in 1984 with a collection of huge and historic road rallies in cities akin to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte.
Civilian rule returned the next 12 months and a brand new structure was launched in 1988. The following 12 months Brazil held its first direct presidential election in practically three a long time.
Chillingly, the movie’s launch has coincided with the publication of a federal police report exhibiting how shut Brazil got here to being plunged again into army rule, simply two years in the past.
Police declare the far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro – a infamous champion of the dictatorship and of torture – oversaw a murderous conspiracy to grab energy after shedding the 2022 election to his leftwing rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro has denied the police allegations.
“It’s proof that the web page hasn’t been turned on this a part of historical past – that it hasn’t been overcome,” Paiva mentioned of the accusations towards Bolsonaro, which embody claims that plotters deliberate to abduct or assassinate the ex-president’s rivals.
“Why hasn’t it been overcome? Because there have been no convictions, there was no reparation [after the dictatorship],” argued Paiva, whose father’s killers had been by no means dropped at justice. “So lengthy as this stuff will not be punished, our democracy will at all times be underneath risk.”
Several of these accused of conspiring with Bolsonaro had been a part of the 1964 regime, together with Augusto Heleno, an aged common who was a minister in his 2018-2023 authorities. “They’re the identical characters,” Paiva mentioned. Heleno has but to touch upon the claims he was concerned.
At the guts of Salles’s movie, which has left many filmgoers in tears, is the Paiva household house: an ethereal seaside home close to Ipanema the place Paiva and his spouse Eunice raised their 5 youngsters.
“I needed to point out that, simply because it occurred to our household, this might have occurred to another household – and it did. It occurred to hundreds of different households,” mentioned Paiva, 65. “We at all times thought this needed to be a movie about household … a household that wishes to be completely happy however can’t be due to the incongruities of political insanity.”
Paiva remembers his father, a congressman whose political profession was reduce quick by the 1964 coup that kickstarted the dictatorship, as a “completely happy, enjoyable man” with “an unimaginable giggle”.
In the months earlier than his abduction, he would take furtive strolls alongside the seaside with British and French newspaper correspondents, “to inform them what was occurring”. The early Nineteen Seventies had been some of the repressive moments of the dictatorship and the closely censored native press was unable to show the abuses of the regime.
Paiva was not concerned within the armed resistance to the dictatorship, his son mentioned. Even so, he was snatched from his house and, the following day, overwhelmed to dying.
Paiva’s disappearance shatters the home bliss depicted within the movie’s opening moments and units up a drama that’s each profoundly Brazilian and hauntingly common.
The movie’s soundtrack options songs by legendary composers, a number of of whom had been jailed or pressured into exile by the dictatorship, like Tom Zé and Caetano Veloso. But the gun-wrenching portrayal of a household destroyed by the ideologically pushed fancies of an authoritarian regime evokes comparable tragedies that proceed to play out, from Beijing to Caracas. “What occurs in China, occurs in Ukraine. It’s occurring now in Venezuela. It occurs all over the place,” mentioned Paiva.
After Rubens Paiva’s pressured disappearance, his spouse – performed by actor and author Fernanda Torres – takes centre stage, battling to defend their youngsters from the horror that has transpired as she seeks solutions a couple of husband she is unable to grieve. Torres’s poignant portrayal of Eunice’s battle has prompted requires her to be given the 2025 Oscar for finest actress.
Paiva thought the movie’s success was partly defined by a thirst for details about the dictatorship by younger Brazilians born after democracy returned. He recalled witnessing comparable scenes in Germany within the early 90s, when audiences packed cinemas to observe Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. “My [German] associates mentioned to me: ‘My mother and father didn’t speak about this. My grandparents didn’t speak about this.’ It was a era that was discovering what had occurred in its nation.”
Paiva believes the re-election of Donald Trump – who has vowed to be a dictator on “day one” of his presidency – made the Brazilian movie much more related. “I believe persons are afraid. Now much more so with Trump,” he mentioned. “The world has turn into one thing we [thought we] had already left behind.”
