Before the night of the 97th Academy Awards rolled around, Brazilian helmer Walter Salles had already made history. He did it by featuring countrywoman Fernanda Torres in his latest cinematic masterpiece I’m Still Here, which won the actress–whom Salles calls a “co-author of the film” — a Golden Globe this year, for Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama. That award was the first ever for a Brazilian actress and it follows Salles’ own Golden Globes win for the 1998 title Central Station, that in itself a Brazilian first. And now, he’s won the first ever Academy Award for a Brazilian produced film with I’m Still Here. 

When I meet Salles for our interview in one of the courtyards of La Mamounia Hotel, where he is staying while attending the 21st edition of the Marrakech International Film Festival to present I’m Still Here to Moroccan audiences, what I notice right away is the filmmaker’s serenity. Granted, everyone’s stress quotient goes down a few notches in this idyllic setting, an outdoors oasis in the middle of Marrakech, but with his graying longish hair, his kind smile, his loose jeans and his Converse, Salles seems at peace with the world. And that’s not an easy thing to achieve in today’s chaos. 

In addition to his native language, Salles is fluent in French and English. Having been born in Rio and raised in France and the US because of his diplomat dad, he sprinkles his thoughts with French words and phrases during our chat. He uses “la fréquence” to describe the acting frequencies emitted by the understatedly grandiose Torres in I’m Still Here and “l’etat du monde” — the state of the world in Brazil at the time the story of the real life Paiva family took place — when talking about the setting of a film which, although telling a Brazilian story, has managed to translate to audiences everywhere.

‍I’m Still Here, which premiered in September 2024 at the Venice Film Festival, tells the true story of Eunice Paiva (Torres) the matriarch of a seemingly average, numerous Brazilian family whose existence is thrown upside down by the disappearance of her husband, former congressman Rubens Paiva. We follow Eunice’s journey as she struggles to keep the family afloat while also trying to find out why the government has arrested her husband, resulting in a void in this formerly joyous nucleus. Told in two acts, before and after the disappearance, Salles changes the film’s tones, looks, and music according to the story; its ultimate success, translated into the film’s numerous awards nominations and wins, rests on the modulated performance of its leading lady. 

I’m Still Here is based on Eunice’s and Rubens’ memoirs, published in 2015 and written by their son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva. The making of this film proved to be a personal journey for Salles, who grew up knowing Nalu, the middle child of the Paiva family, who was the same age as the filmmaker and a friend of a friend.

Salles’ filmography is as remarkably unique as the man himself. He is regarded as one of the major figures of the Cinema da Retomada — or “Resumption Cinema,” a renaissance period that started in the mid-90s and saw Brazilian films once again gain popularity in the international circuit. His titles include the aforementioned Central Station (1988) which also secured a Best Foreign Language Film nomination, as well as a Best Actress nomination for leading lady Fernanda Montenegro (Torres’ mother in real life, who plays the older Eunice in I’m Still Here) at the 1999 Oscars. Salles also directed 2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries, which follows Ernesto “Che” Guevara (played by Gael García Bernal) on his 1952 road trip across South America, an adventure which helped give birth to Che’s revolutionary impulses. 

“Every time I do a fiction film I try to go back to my roots, which are documentaries,” Salles confesses, which is why after his 2012 big screen adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, featuring Kristen Stewart, Sam Riley, Viggo Peter Mortensen, and Amy Adams, he went back to documentary with Jia Zhangke, A Guy From Fenyang a film about the Chinese filmmaker. 

Next, he’s working on another doc. “I did a documentary series on Sócrates [Brasileiro], a soccer player in Brazil who launched a democratic movement in the 1980s which led to the search for the return of democracy in Brazil,” Salles says. It seems a natural segue from his Oscar-winning title, which recalls the worst of the military dictatorship for his native country.

“I also did two original screenplays that I wrote on Brazil, to be done in Brazil…” he continues. “And as I was finishing those screenplays, reality came and somehow didn’t justify those projects anymore. I think this did not happen only in Brazil, it has to do with how the zeitgeist has changed on the political, cultural standpoint in the last decade and it somehow made it more difficult to be in complete synchronicity with the times.” The Bolsonaro era is one easily forgotten in the international media but it hit the country like a bulldozer, although now leadership has, thankfully, changed in Brazil. 

“Today is the day to feel even prouder of being Brazilian,” Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared on X after Salles’ win on Sunday night. “Pride for our cinema, for our artists and, primarily, pride for our democracy.”

“If you write music, you can offer a reflection of what happened today, this week, you can do music this way,” Salles says, to further explain why he shelved his two previous projects, “but if you do film, you have to anticipate what is going to happen to be in synchronicity.”

About the music in I’m Still Here, which helps shape the atmosphere and mood of the family before and after Rubens’ disappearance, Salles gets personal, mentioning his connection with the family whose unique household he visited as a teenager. “This is really a film about youth, at the beginning, as I was [around] 13 [or] 14” when the story kicks off. He continues, “This is a film about youth and joy and life. And freedom. And then it’s about how all those things were robbed at a certain point. As the country was robbed of a possible future. So music was very central in that decade, because what you heard defined who you were. Or what you saw in the cinema defined what you were.” On the selection of songs, which include the addictive “Take Me Back to Piauí’” by Juca Chaves, Salles says, “The choice of music was very specific in that. In Brazilian terms it has to do with a movement called ‘Tropicalia’ which blends our Afro-Brazilian roots with what the authors in exile — like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil — were discovering when they were in exile in England, with the electric guitar.”

Appropriately, while we are talking about the relationship between sound and atmosphere, the afternoon light we sat down to has fallen around us and the Maghrib Islamic prayer at twilight, is about to begin — with the muezzin calling the faithful through his traditional chant. The evening lights of La Mamounia have also come on, making for a whole new ambiance around us. 

“Somehow reality came and made me look further,” Salles goes back to those two shelved screenplays and how his Oscar-winning film came about. “And then my friend Marcelo Rubens Paiva wrote this brilliant book about the memory of his family, which intertwined with the memory of Brazil for the last four decades, [and] in which he discovered that his mother had been the silent heroine of that family.”

Salles then confesses what I’ve believed about his special brand of filmmaking all along, when talking about Paiva’s story. “It blended, you know, something which always attracted me in cinema which was the personal story with the collective story—the larger story.” He continues, “This is when we immersed ourselves—with two young writers [Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega] and me—to try to get the transmutation from literature to cinema.”

I then ask Salles what single quality attracted him to his leading lady Fernanda Torres, since during an insightful conversation with the public earlier in the afternoon, the filmmaker pointed to Gael García Bernal’s “rawness” in The Motorcycle Diaries as the quality which had attracted him to the Mexican actor. 

“Her extraordinary emotional intelligence,” Salles says, without blinking or thinking. “The capacity to actually understand that in portraying restraint she could offer so many different layers. And that is a highly difficult thing to do because ‘la fréquence’ — the frequency with which you are working — is not enormous, and yet you have to make it full of nuances. I think that thanks to her talent, but also emotional intelligence, she was able to do that, to the point that I really consider her a co-author of the film.”

This subtlety is probably what audiences and award voters are relating to when watching Torres. She carries the tragedy of the Paiva family on her shoulders, almost singlehandedly. And, in a moving, true to life moment in the film, she insists that the remaining family all pose for a photograph for an article sporting defiant smiles instead of the customary sadness the journalist and photographer would prefer. 

“It was important to understand ‘l’etat du monde’ — the state of the world — of this family,” Salles explains. “The way that family lived. Because for me, to live with that kind of joy was a form of resistance — their own form of resistance. And then that was taken away and this woman, this mother, then has to become the mother and the father of that family. And the ways in which she finds how to come back I think, was to go back to that luminous past and find that ‘OK, I’m not going to be seen as a victim, but every time someone will say please act sadly I’m going to smile.’ Which she actually did.”

When asked what his favorite question or comment has been from Moroccan audiences, Salles answers, “Several people said, ‘I had the impression I wasn’t seeing a film, I was being part of that story.’ That is a beautiful way of putting it.” The Brazilian auteur mentions this is his first trip to Marrakech, and his travels through the Middle East aren’t over, as next month he’ll be in Qatar as one of the Masters featured in the Doha Film Institute’s annual industry incubator, Qumra. 

“I learned so many things. I got to be finally in Morocco, a place that I was interested in thanks to cinema and to music, and now I have the opportunity to be here.” He adds, “What cinema has allowed me to learn is how polyphonic we are and to continue to keep the curiosity alive.”  

Now, almost on cue, birds begin chirping in the background, as begins Marrakech wrapping around us its balmy early night cloak, one that carries with it promises of great food, chanceful meetings and, during the festival, groundbreaking cinematic encounters.

I ask Salles about the photographs of the real Paiva family that are featured in the end credits, and if he always knew that’s how he wanted to end I’m Still Here. “When you go to films where the credits are just rolling, it feels like it breaks abruptly the experience of watching the film. So I always try to find a way for the credits to have a narrative quality or at least a sensorial quality,” he explains. “The credits [here] are eight minutes long because you also say goodbye to the house, which is a character of the film itself, another character, and those shots are also about the memory of that house that is being abandoned, [but] in fact is never going to be fully abandoned anymore because it exists in cinema. This was the idea of the movie.”

Cinema creates a fascinating world, not just in front of the cameras or on the big screen, but also in the connections it helps to form behind the scenes — and this interview proves no exception. The journalist and the subject are somehow forever connected by the words, the curiosity they shared. 

“What ties us all here is because cinema is really what allows us, commonly through the collective nature of cinema, to understand a little bit more about human nature,” Salles seems to be reading my thoughts. “There is always something that we don’t know yet and somehow it’s interesting, for the better and for the worse. In discussing cinema or through cinema you, again, become more aware of the world. And less numb. We are living in an age of numbness and to be able to trespass it, to radically be able to trespass is interesting.”

‍I’m Still Here is currently in cinemas in the US and is distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.

Written by E. Nina Rothe