Oscars 2025: The case for I'm Still Here to win Best Picture

This is the true story of the Paiva family, whose patriarch Rubens (played by Selton Mello) is suddenly disappeared by the country’s military during the early 1970s. Rubens’s wife, Eunice (Torres), is also arrested and interrogated, and after her release fights for information on Rubens’s whereabouts while protecting the freedom of her five children. (It is a book by son Marcelo, played here by Guilherme Silveira and Antonio Saboia, that provides the basis for the film’s brilliantly structured screenplay.)

Ultimately, the story is not about that horrifying moment, but about how Eunice and her family work to move on from it for the remainder of Brazil’s military dictatorship and beyond. Per the title, it’s about the act and the ethics of survival: keeping memories alive, preserving history, pursuing truth when so much has been deliberately suppressed.

But for all the gravity of its subject matter, and the tense, thriller-y material of its traumatic middle act, much of the film’s effect rests on a sense of intimacy often forgotten in such tales of grand political history. The opening half-hour or so (out of a riveting and richly earned 136 minutes) follows the Paiva clan in the month leading up to Rubens’s arrest.

Veteran director Walter Salles, a master of pacing, takes time to show us the group dynamic of this warm, loving middle-class family and the acquaintances who move in and out of their coastal home in Rio de Janeiro. It’s loose without growing languid, and the occasional allusions to Rubens’s small acts of resistance against the dictatorship are never excessively ominous. The ensemble cast feels as real and natural as the production’s low-key period stylings. In short, this film is alive and, better still, feels remarkably unburdened by its historical weight.

It's that deft approach to its subject matter — not least a careful deployment of real and re-created 16mm "home movie" interstices — that provides I’m Still Here its deep resonance. Historical pictures can risk a sense of distance; but the dynamic naturalism of Salles’s drama smartly swerves the “couldn’t happen here” fallacy, despite its being set half a century ago.

More directly, the film ends its narrative resolutely in the contemporary moment with an affecting coda set in 2014 that sees an elderly Eunice, still surrounded by her family but now living with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Played in this section by Torres’s mother, the legendary Fernanda Montenegro, Eunice — who died in 2018 — comes to represent the profound nexus between political resistance, historical memory, and the importance of family.

• Download the Radio Times app for more Oscars 2025 coverage – including interviews with the stars and exclusive features.

The stillness of Montenegro’s work in this final stretch is a poignant foil to Torres’s multi-layered performance of quiet dignity and unyielding strength throughout the rest of the film. It adds up to a portrait that transcends biographical re-creation and aims for something specific, universal and, in today’s troubling global political climate, heroic all at once.

It’s the kind of sober yet non-didactic — and, again, alive — examination of real issues and ideas that the best of the best-picture winners aim for.

Unlike the self-consciously glib Conclave and Emilia Pérez, a win for I’m Still Here would show an Academy votership willing to engage with something genuinely substantive. Unlike Wicked: Part I, Dune: Part Two or, indeed, the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, its hypothetical win would not double as a frankly dull and unnecessary endorsement for long-established studio safe bets. And were it to beat its Euro-festival peers Anora, The Brutalist and The Substance, it would be through sheer quality, rather than months of careful industry marketing tactics. (Which is not to say those films aren’t themselves excellent.)

The "for your consideration" campaign for I’m Still Here focused initially on Torres’s performance; that so many voters seem to have organically fallen in love with and voted for the film in the Best Picture field is a heartening example of something rare in the modern awards season: a true grassroots trajectory.

The Academy Awards will take place on Sunday 2nd March.

Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.