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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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.