Review

Culture

Film & TV

Freedom

20 March 2025

6 min read

I’m Still Here is a celebration of Brazilian resilience

The Brazilian Oscar winner is an act of remembrance.

Matt Lewis

Matt is a songwriter and musician, currently completing an MA in theology at Trinity College, Bristol.

A woman, wearing 70s clothing, stands, looking apprehensive.

Fernanda Torres as Eunice Paiva.

The other week in Brazil, crowds were heard jubilantly celebrating: “Brazil! Brazil!” The characteristically enthusiastic nature of their celebration might make you think there had been a football victory. But the victory was in fact the Oscar win for I’m Still Here, the Walter Salles directed movie – a first time win for Brazil in Best International Picture. And Brazil should be proud. As the credits rolled in an independent cinema, I sat in stunned silence. I’m Still Here is a moving and expertly crafted portrayal of family life under tyranny. The film gives a tragic account of the insidious and destructive nature of authoritarian untruth - yet also a celebration of the defiant resistance of unsung heroes in the face of evil.

Set in 1970’s Rio de Janeiro during a military dictatorship that lasted for 21 years, the film centres around the true story of the Paiva family. The father, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a former dissident congressman, is abducted by the military for interrogation and disappears; the mother, Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), who herself is imprisoned and tortured for 12 days, is left to keep the family together and continue the search for her husband.

At this point, I should admit that this review is not unbiased, as I have been to Brazil six times, and have an enthusiastic interest in its history and culture. And despite the sombre tone at the heart of the movie, I’m Still Here felt like a celebration of Brazil. The film opens with an ominous helicopter flying over a Rio beach, which leads us to the Paiva family enjoying the sun with their friends. The fun, vibrancy, and warmth that permeates the family gathering reminded me of much of what I love about Brazilian culture. Even in the midst of a repressive regime, at least for this family, the party goes on.

Unfortunately, the party doesn’t last for long.

Thirty minutes into the film, the relative harmony of the Paiva family’s world is sharply interrupted, when the military police arrive at their home and announce that Rubens is wanted for interrogation. As the intruders close the curtains and doors, the light, warmth and music that permeated the start of the movie are muffled and suffocated. This scene plays like a microcosm for Brazilian society under authoritarian regime.

Historians Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling, in their book Brazil: A Biography document how on 14 December 1968, the Jornal do Brasil, a leading daily newspaper, published a special edition to surprise their readers, including a false weather report: ‘Suffocating temperature. Air unbreathable.’ The previous day, the military dictatorship had announced a law which suspended habeas corpus and freedom of expression, permitted the annulment of citizen’s rights, and determined that political trials would be conducted by military courts, with no right of appeal. This allowed the dictatorship to repress political dissent, and led to the mass disappearances of individuals suspected of anti-government activity.

We see this suffocation slowly take hold of Eunice Paiva. Here Fernanda Torres’ subtle yet arresting performance as the Paiva mother cannot be understated. As she tries to maintain a sense of normalcy in her family, protecting them from the truth, while also quietly and defiantly seeking her husband’s release, we hang on to her every word and nuance of expression.

Every confrontation she makes to the police is met with deflection, lies, and cover-up. We watch as the insidiously persuasive untruth of authoritarianism seems to triumph over integrity. We get this sense from the world around the Paiva family too – the radio only relays state-sanctioned news, and censors music deemed subversive. I’m reminded of George Orwell’s depiction of the Party in 1984, which enforces ‘doublethink’ on the populace: ‘to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies … consciously to induce unconsciousness.’

Eunice can be seen as a counterpart to Orwell’s protagonist, Winston, who claimed ‘There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.’ This refusal to let go of truth carries Eunice Paiva, and us along with her.

While a song won’t take down a dictatorship overnight, it can get into your head, and stick there long enough to inspire some forms of resistance.

The presence of music in the movie likewise represents a significant thread of resistance to the regime’s propaganda and shrouded crimes. This is heard not just in the vibrant soundtrack of resistance music from the period, but also in the dark and hostile prison where Eunice Paiva is held. Amid screams from other inmates, Eunice hears a man sing out from another cell:

Samba:

Black,

strong, fearless,

Was harshly persecuted

On the corner, in the bar, in the yard.

He is quickly silenced by a guard, but the refrain memorialises the cry of the oppressed. While a song won’t take down a dictatorship overnight, it can get into your head, and stick there long enough to inspire some forms of resistance, to combat the ‘official’ narrative of events with a subversive counter-narrative.

Yet in I’m Still Here, the clearest act of resistance comes from the quiet but resolved determination of Eunice Paiva in her refusal to forget her husband, to let the untruth of dictatorship have the final say. I’m reminded of Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis of the ‘banality of evil’ in Nazi Germany. Under dictatorship, with the state’s obfuscatory erasure of its misdeeds, evil becomes normalised, losing its shock, its horror. In this way, atrocities can continue to be committed with impunity.

But Eunice Paiva’s story reminds us, in Schwarz and Starling’s words: ‘nothing can be completely extinguished, and no one disappears completely without someone remembering their name.' As Chico Buarque, a Brazilian musician foresaw:

The banal of today

Will be in journals someday.

One aspect of Eunice’s story the film does not portray is her faith. According to her children, she would attend Catholic Mass every week, partaking of bread and wine to remember Christ’s death. I’m curious what influence this continued reminder of the crucifixion of Jesus had on her.

There are other examples of resistance in Brazil that were explicitly motivated by the image of the cross. Schwarz and Starling recount the opposition of a group of Catholic bishops who used the Church’s communication channels to disclose internationally what was happening in Brazil. One Catholic father, who was personal assistant to the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, working on international human rights, was kidnapped, tortured and killed.

In 1970 the Saint-Germain-des-Prés Church in Paris displayed a handcuffed Christ on the altar with a tube in his mouth and a magneto (small generator for applying electric shocks) on the top of the Cross. Above the Cross the words from the Brazilian flag ‘Ordem e Progresso’ were inscribed.

While we can see the strong parallels between Jesus’ death at the hands of Roman imperial oppressors and the unjust torture of thousands under military dictatorship, the message of the Cross goes even deeper than this.

The Cross has been throughout centuries a revelation of all of humanity’s deepest wickedness, and not only that, a confrontation of our tendency to evade accountability, to create untruths to hide atrocities, to make evil banal. Yet as Christians of different denominations commemorate the crucifixion at Holy Communion, Eucharist, Mass, we are reminded of a God who suffers for the sins of the world. Perhaps this meal nourished Eunice Paiva in her fight against tyranny. Perhaps this memorial of a suffering saviour served as an inspiration to retain the memory of all those who suffer, to expose the evils that so often go unseen.

In any case, I’m Still Here, while giving an honest critique of Brazil’s history, ends up being a memorial - even a celebration - of the resilient, Brazilian spirit, exemplified in the lives of families like the Paivas.

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Article

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

11 October 2024

5 min read

Cartoon villains: who's the real baddie?

What kind of villain do we want?

James Cary

James is a writer of sit coms for BBC TV and Radio.

A cartoon chase sees a car driven by a cow escaping from a car of baddies under a giant poster of their villainous boss.

Jazz Cow vs. Dr Popp.

“Nobody thinks they’re the bad guy”. That’s a phrase I often use when helping people write situation comedies. It’s always useful to have a strong antagonist who gets in the way of our hero. But the villains tend not to consider themselves to be evil. In fact, they are offended at the suggestion.

The Batman universe has turned the interesting villain to new levels. The Penguin is Gotham’s latest production, a brand-new TV series on HBO. Colin Farrell plays a highly nuanced anti-hero, exploring The Penguin’s “awkwardness, and his strength, and his villainy, yes, his propensity for violence”. Farrell told Comicbook.com he was attracted to the role because “there's also a heartbroken man inside there you know, which just makes it really tasty.” Audiences are often invited to have sympathy for the devil. Should we be worried about the blurring of the lines between good and evil?

I’ve been asking myself this question as I’ve been writing a new animation which involves a villain called Dr Popp who is trying to take over a city. But what kind of villain do we want in 2024?

Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of The Joker back in 1989 feels like pop-culture ancient history. His Joker was an embittered agent of chaos without many redeeming qualities but mercifully lacked the nihilism of later versions. It was an old-fashioned story of cops and robbers which has its own simplistic charm. But have those days gone forever, having been shot in the head and dropped off a bridge into a river?

The problem is it is so easy to humanise evil. You just give it a human face. The arch-villains of the twentieth century – the Nazi members of the SS – are rather sweet when portrayed by comedians Mitchell and Webb. A nervous member of the SS Unit (Mitchell) waiting for an attack from the Russians looks at the skull on his cap and asks his fellow comrade-in-arms (Webb): “Hans, are we the baddies?”

Any student of World War Two will know that it’s never as simple as good versus evil. Many terrible things were done by people who felt justified in their behaviour. Moreover, ‘the goodies’ also felt compelled to do morally dubious things – like the bombing of civilians in cities – in order to defeat ‘the baddies. After all, they started it.’ The truth is always far more complicated than the war films suggest.

Dr Popp is the very worst kind of villain: he has great power and he wants to help. In his own mind, he’s completely clear about his mission.

Ten years ago, I was researching real life baddies for my sitcom Bluestone 42 about a bomb disposal team set in Afghanistan. At times, I had to think like the Taliban who, in their own minds, were entirely justified in leaving bombs by the side of the road, to be triggered by British soldiers or Afghan children. They were pretty relaxed about the outcome. It’s hard to sympathise with this way of thinking, but it made sense to them.

My internet search history from that time probably put me on some sort of Home Office watchlist. Maybe a small dossier was started on me. More recently, that dossier would have become thicker as I’ve moved sideways from sitcom into murder mysteries, having recently worked on Death in Paradise and Shakespeare and Hathaway. To work on shows like these, you need to be thinking of good reasons for good people to commit murder. Someone would need a very strong motive to commit a murder on an idyllic Caribbean island where the local detective has a 100 per cent resolution rate. You also need to research ingenuous methods for murdering people in a way that escapes detection. I’m surprised I’ve not yet had a knock on my door, or enquiries made to the neighbours to call a number if they see anything suspicious.

But what about cartoon villains where nothing is real? The bold colours and the larger-than-life characters might suggest that there is more clarity about goodies and baddies. But there isn’t. Evil villains – that is, villains who realise they are evil – are extremely rare. Skeletor from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe comes to mind. This kind of demonic baddie can be entertaining with wit and charm, like Hades in the Disney movie, Hercules. This character had some brilliant one-liners and was superbly brought to life by the voice of James Woods. Overall, however, purely evil characters are hard to write.

Cartoon villains need proper motivation. This is either a character flaw or a backstory. In The Lion King, Scar is consumed with envy that his brother is king – and a good one at that. In The Incredibles, Syndrome is playing out his sense of injustice that he was not allowed to be Mr Incredible’s sidekick, Incrediboy. In The Simpsons, Mr Burns is essentially Mr Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. He’s a Scrooge-type figure who doesn’t care about love and respect. He just wants to own the town.

The cartoon villain I’ve been thinking about is for a new animation project I’ve been working on called Jazz Cow. The eponymous hero is a saxophone-playing cow and a reluctant Bogart-style leader of a bohemian band of misfits. They are trying resist the advance of the all-consuming algorithm created by Dr Popp, the villain. But what’s his motivation?

Dr Popp is the very worst kind of villain: he has great power and he wants to help. In his own mind, he’s completely clear about his mission. He’s trying to make the world better, easier, safer, cheaper, more efficient and convenient. Why would anyone want to refuse his technology, reject his software and keep away from his algorithm?

This is why Dr Popp has to silence Jazz Cow, literally, by stealing his saxophone. He simply cannot allow Jazz Cow to delight audiences at Connie Snott’s with live improvised music. There’s no need for this music! Dr Popp has all the music you could possibly need, want or imagine. Why improvise when we have artificial intelligence?

Dr Popp is a cartoon villain for today when relativism is still alive and well. ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ are still concepts or points of view rather than absolutes. However, there is good and evil in Jazz Cow. But the evil doesn’t come from Doctor Popp. It comes from the user or consumer. That would be us.

‘The Algorithm’ is always learning and always trying to give us our hearts’ desire. And that’s the problem: our hearts frequently desire that which they cannot – and should not – have. Dr Popp’s algorithm is like a mirror held up to our faces. In it, we see the real baddie: ourselves. Not even Jazz Cow can save us from that. But what this horn-playing cow can do is to make the world a more humane place.

For more information about Jazz Cow, and information on how you can make the show happen, take a look at our Kickstarter – and don’t worry. Jazz Cow would approve, as it’s the creative’s way of sticking IT to the man.