Brazil wins its first Oscar with 'I'm Still Here' winning in the Best International Film category

Film I’m Still Here, set upon about a family torn apart by the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for more than two decades, gave Brazil’s first Oscars win on Sunday in the Best International Film category.

The Walter Salles film stars Fernanda Torres as Eunice Paiva, the wife of Rubens Paiva, a former leftist Brazilian congressman who, at the height of the country’s military dictatorship in 1971, was taken from his family’s Rio de Janeiro home and never returned.

I'm Still Here is a reflection on Brazil's military dictatorship

Salles paid homage to Paiva’s bravery, and Torres for portraying her along with Fernanda Montenegro, the daughter of one of the country’s greatest stars. She appears late in the film as the older Eunice.

“This goes to a woman who after a loss suffered during a authoritarian regime decided not to bend and resist. This prize goes to her,” Salles said during his acceptance speech, as the audience gave a standing ovation. “And it goes to the two extraordinary women who gave life to her.”

“Today is the day to feel even prouder of being Brazilian,” Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wrote on X, “Pride for our cinema, for our artistes and, primarily, pride for our democracy.”

The focus of I’m Still Here, based on the memoir by Paiva’s son Marcelo, is Eunice, the mother of five left to remake their family’s life with neither her husband nor any answers for his disappearance. It unfolds as a portrait of a different kind of political resistance — one of steadfast endurance.

Eunice refuses the military dictatorship’s attempt to break her and her family. When, in one scene, Eunice and her children — by then long without their disappeared father — pose for a newspaper photograph, she tells them to smile.

I’m Still Here is a deeply Brazilian story, made by one of the country’s most acclaimed directors (Salles’ films include “Central Station” and “Motorcycle Diaries”) and Montenegro.

Also nominated for best international film were Denmark’s The Girl with the Needle, Germany’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Latvia’s Flow and France’s Emilia Pérez” a onetime Oscars favourite marred by controversy.

(With inputs from AP)