Tlisted below are many causes Walter Salles’s heart-rending drama I’m Nonetheless Right here ought to win the Oscar for finest image: its beautiful Brazilian soundtrack, extraordinary, empathetic performances and poignant camerawork to call a number of.
However absolutely one of the compelling is the enormous celebration such a victory would produce within the director’s native Brazil the place, serendipitously, Oscar evening falls slap bang in the midst of the nation’s annual carnival.
The South American nation has thrown its assist behind the movie like not often earlier than, with greater than 4 million folks flocking to cinemas to observe it and critics calling it one in all Brazil’s finest films in years. Many have emerged shell-shocked and teary-eyed from screenings of Salles’s devastating dictatorship-era story of a younger household ripped aside by the vicious whims of an authoritarian regime.
The movie’s three Oscar nominations – for finest worldwide function movie, finest actress and finest image – have prompted an outpouring of patriotic delight that such a depressing chapter in Brazilian historical past is perhaps reworked into one thing altogether extra optimistic. “Such satisfaction!” enthused the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, after the movie’s nominations had been introduced.
Because the awards ceremony nears, Brazilian social media is awash with messages of assist. Some followers have hung Brazil’s yellow and inexperienced flag of their entrance rooms as if getting ready for a World Cup remaining. Others have produced carnival costumes celebrating Fernanda Torres, the lead actor in Salles’s movie, or the golden Oscar statuette. “It’s going to be insane,” Torres not too long ago mentioned of the revelry that can grip Brazil if the nation wins its first-ever finest image award.
These celebrations are removed from the one cause I’m Nonetheless Right here deserves a gong. Much more importantly, the movie has struck a chord, in Brazil and world wide, as audiences grapple with a brand new authoritarian age, spearheaded by self-obsessed strongmen not not like those that dominated Brazil throughout the 1964-85 navy regime portrayed in I’m Nonetheless Right here.
The movie tells the story of Rubens Paiva, a 41-year-old politician who was snatched from his beachfront household residence in the summertime of 1971 by brokers of the dictatorship. “I’m going to assist these males and I’ll be proper again,” Paiva, performed by celebrated Brazilian actor Selton Mello, tells his daughter as he’s led away, by no means to be seen once more. (Authorities would solely acknowledge his homicide 25 years later).
Powerfully, the story of Paiva’s abduction and homicide is essentially advised not by grisly scenes of torture-chamber gore, however by the profoundly dignified method by which his spouse, Eunice, performed masterfully by Torres, responds to the crime.
As Salles’s delicate drama progresses, we comply with Eunice’s lonely battle to protect the couple’s 5 kids from the horror that has befallen them and procure solutions concerning the destiny of the love of her life.
Paiva’s son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva – who helped Salles flip his 2015 bestseller into a movie – advised me that zooming in on one household’s story was meant to show the “mindless political persecution” such regimes had been able to inflicting on each one in all us. “We all the time thought this needed to be a movie about household … a household that desires to be completely happy however can’t be due to the incongruities of political insanity,” he mentioned once we spoke final 12 months.
Salles’s intimate portrait of the emotional penalties of such calculated madness has chilling echoes within the headlines of right now, as Venezuelan males are hauled off to Guantánamo Bay to please Donald Trump’s base, and Vladimir Putin’s troops shatter the lives of numerous households in Ukraine.
I’m Nonetheless Here’s a movie for the merciless and unsettling instances as soon as once more sweeping the globe. If any movie deserves the 2025 Oscar, that is it.
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