"I'm Still Here" is an important movie about a horrible period of brazilian history but it's also an important movie about grief.
It's about the realization that your life has been profoundly, irreparably changed forever that never comes in the moment of pain. Sometimes it hits you at a diner and you just have to keep it together because who else will? Can't cry now, you just have to swallow your grief and keep going.
It's about love for and from this family, about little moments of life with people coming and going, dancing over good meals...And then it’s all suddenly taken away.
It's a movie about ghosts.
The movie shows the "ghost of the dictatorship" and how it haunts, but also the ghosts of losing people you loved deeply and suddenly. It's why this specific and very short dialogue from the movie makes me tear up every time I remember it:
"When did you realize Dad was never coming home?"
Because how many days after his death did I, too, wait for my Dad to come home to hug me until one ordinary day at school, having a hard time on a math test, I realized that he was never coming back to help me study math ever again? And how many times did the children of Rubens Paiva felt the same as I did doing their daily and ordinary tasks?
This is a tough thing. The perception of grief in the middle of a meeting where you can't send a message to that person complaining, a photo that would have been funny to them but you no longer have that person, a plan that evaporates in the nonexistence of the other...
The pain of loss always hits much harder in everyday life... Like that scene of Eunice Paiva at the ice cream shop without her husband and seeing other families being complete while hers wasn't.
This idea of the vacuum of an everyday space is deadly...And even years later, when you think you're over it, it hits just like the day it happened: while listening to a song they liked, watching a movie you know they would've loved to watch with you, a book they showed you, eating a food you two would eat together...Their ghosts are always there, the grief is always looming.
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