Brazilian film 'I’m Still Here' tops box office, forcing nation to reckon with dictatorship trauma

SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazilian-made dramas rarely last long in local cinemas. But, nearly two months after its release, “I’m Still Here,” a film about a family torn apart by the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for more than two decades, has drawn millions of moviegoers across the South American country.

The film's domestic box office success — with nearly 3 million tickets sold, it secured the fifth spot at the 2024 box office by mid December — is rooted in its exploration of a long-neglected national trauma, but it is particularly timely, especially as Brazil confronts a recent near-miss with democratic rupture.

Set in the 1970s and based on true events, “I’m Still Here” tells the story of the Paivas, an upper-class family in Rio de Janeiro shattered by the dictatorship. Rubens Paiva, a former leftist congressman, was taken into custody by the military in 1971 and was never seen again. The narrative centers on his wife, Eunice Paiva, and her lifelong pursuit of justice.

The film was nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign language film and shortlisted for the Oscars in the same category.

“Comedies and other topics are more likely to become mega-successes, but this (the dictatorship) is a very taboo subject for us,” said Brazilian psychoanalyst and writer Vera Iaconelli, adding that she felt a “sense of urgency” after watching the movie last month, even though the dictatorship ended almost four decades ago.

As the movie was being shown across Brazil, the Federal Police unsealed a report detailing a 2022 plot by military officers to stage a coup to prevent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from taking office, and to keep far-right former army captain Jair Bolsonaro in power. Bolsonaro and his allies have denied any involvement in participating or inciting a coup.

“Even if (director) Walter Salles wanted to plan the timing of the release this precisely, he wouldn’t have gotten it so right,” said Lucas Pedretti, a historian and sociologist whose works address memory and reparations after the military dictatorship.

“The film plays a very important role in telling us: ‘Look, this is what would happen if the coup that was planned by Bolsonaro and his military officers had succeeded.’”

Unlike countries like Argentina and Chile, which established truth commissions and prosecuted former dictators and their henchmen, Brazil's transition back to democracy was marked by a sweeping amnesty to military officials.

For years, said Pedretti, Brazil’s military promoted the notion that government silence was the best way to bury the past.

It was not until 2011 that Brazil’s then- President Dilma Rousseff — a former guerrilla who was tortured during the dictatorship — established a national truth commission to investigate its abuses.

The commission's 2014 report detailed harrowing accounts of torture and named perpetrators of human rights violations — none were ever imprisoned. But just as a reckoning of the dictatorship began, calls for a return to military rule emerged in street protests against corruption revelations.

It was then that Marcelo Rubens Paiva, one of Rubens' sons, decided to share his family's story in his 2015 book “I'm Still Here." The book introduced Eunice Paiva to a larger audience, chronicling her journey from a housewife to a relentless advocate for her disappeared husband, and how she raised five children by herself, while also pursuing a law degree.

In the years that followed, far-right, anti-establishment forces increasingly gained traction. Bolsonaro — who has long celebrated the coup and praised dictatorship-era torturers — would go on to ride that wave to a presidential victory in 2018.

Observing the surge of the far-right in Brazil, filmmaker Salles realized the country's memory of its dictatorship was very fragile. He said he saw a need for his country to confront its trauma in order to prevent history from repeating itself.

“I’m Still Here” isn’t the first Brazilian movie to explore the memory of the dictatorship, but it is the most popular. Unlike other films on the subject that tend to focus on dissidents and armed resistance, Salles chose to frame his as a family drama and how the disappearance of the family patriarch upended their day-to-day lives.

Its climax — spoiler alert! — arrives 25 years after Rubens’ disappearance, when Eunice finally receives his death certificate.

In December, a month after the film’s premiere, the Brazilian government allowed families of dictatorship-era victims to obtain reissued death certificates acknowledging state-sponsored killings.

"It is very symbolic that this is happening amid the international repercussion of ‘I’m Still Here’ ... so younger people can understand a bit of what that period was like,” Brazil's Human Rights Minister Macaé Evaristo said during the announcement, calling it an important step in the “healing process for Brazilian society.”

The healing process remains incomplete, as some forces — once again — seek to prevent those who allegedly sought to sabotage democracy from being held to account.

On Nov. 29, Bolsonaro urged Lula and the Supreme Court to grant amnesty for those involved in the 2022 alleged coup plot and, alongside his allies, pushed for legislation to pardon participants in the 2023 anti-democratic riot that aimed to oust Lula and marked an echo of the Capitol insurrection in the U.S.

“The coup is still here. It’s still in people’s minds, it’s still in the minds of the military,” said Paulo Sergio Almeida, a filmmaker and founder of Filme B, a company that tracks Brazil's national cinema. “We thought this was a thing of the past, but it’s not. The past is still present in Brazil.”

This time around, many Brazilians are calling for the prosecution of those responsible for the attempted coup, believing that justice is essential for national reconciliation and future progress.

On Dec. 14, police arrested Bolsonaro's 2022 running mate and former defense minister in connection with investigations into the alleged coup plot, becoming the first four-star general arrested by civilians since the end of the dictatorship in 1985.

“It's a sign that we are making progress as a constitutional democracy,” leftist Sen. Randolfe Rodrigues wrote on X that day. “Brazil still has a long way to go as a Republic, but today is a HISTORIC day on this journey.”

Brazilians have also embraced the “No amnesty!" rallying cry, which originated at street protests in the aftermath of the capital's 2023 riot and can still be heard.

Earlier this month, a Supreme Court justice cited “I’m Still Here” while arguing that the 1979 amnesty law shouldn’t apply to the crime of concealing bodies.

“The disappearance of Rubens Paiva, whose body was never found or buried, highlights the enduring pain of thousands of families,” Justice Flávio Dino said.

Striking a chord in Brazil was precisely Marcelo Rubens Paiva's intent when adapting his book into a film.

“The movie is sparking this debate, and it arrived at the right moment for people to recognize that living under a dictatorship is no longer acceptable,” he said.

On a recent evening in Sao Paulo, 46-year-old Juliana Patrícia and her 16-year-old daughter, Ana Júlia, left a movie theater in tears, touched by “I’m Still Here.”

“We saw all the suffering that Eunice endured, with Rubens being killed and taken from his family in such a brutal way,” Patrícia said. “It made us even more certain that democracy needs to be respected and that, as Brazilians, we must fight harder to ensure that this never happens in our country again.”

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

FILE - A demonstrator holds a sign that reads in Portuguese "Never commemorate. Remember in order to not repeat. Dictatorship never again," during a protest against Brazil's 1964 military coup, in Rio de Janeiro, March 31, 2019. (AP Photo/Leo Correa, File)

FILE - With a mask hanging in the foreground, demonstrators perform as victims in a torture device called pau-de-arara, or parrot's perch, during a demonstration organized by the Rio de Paz NGO to remember the victims of Brazil's military dictatorship, on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, Dec. 10, 2019. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo, File)

Writer Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the author of the book that served as the basis for the film "I'm Still Here," poses for a photo during an interview in Sao Paulo, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

FILE - Armed forces take part in a ceremony to commemorate the 1964 military coup that began the last Brazilian dictatorship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, March 28, 2019. (AP Photo/Andre Penner, File)

FILE - Unidentified men detain a student during a protest in Sao Paulo, Oct. 9, 1968. (AP Photo/Agencia Estado, File)

FILE - Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, left, and Defense Minister Walter Braga Netto attend a ceremony honoring military athletes who participated in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the military's Admiral Adalberto Nunes Physical Education Center in Rio de Janeiro, Sept. 1, 2021. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo, File)

FILE - Police gather on the other side of a window that was shattered by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro who stormed the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, Jan. 8, 2023. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres, File)

FILE - Walter Salles, left, director of the film "I'm Still Here," and cast member Fernanda Torres pose for a portrait to promote the film, Nov. 13, 2024, in West Hollywood, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)

People wait to watch the film "I'm Still Here," at a movie theater in Sao Paulo, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

FILE - Demonstrators hold photos of people who were killed in Brazil's dictatorship, during the "Walk of Silence" march in memory of the victims, marking the anniversary of the country's 1964 coup, in Sao Paulo, April 2, 2023. (AP Photo/Andre Penner, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Marc Rosenberg, founder and CEO of The Edge Desk in Deerfield, Illinois is getting ready to introduce a fancy ergonomic chair designed to reduce customers’ back pain and boost their productivity. He figures the most expensive one will sell for more than $1,000. But he can’t settle on a price, and he is reluctantly reducing the shipment he’s bringing to the United States from China.

There’s a reason for his caution: President Donald Trump’s ever-changing, on-again, off-again tariff war with America’s three biggest trading partners – Mexico, Canada and China.

The latest reversal came Thursday. Two days after imposing 25% taxes — tariffs — on all imports from Canada and Mexico and threatening to detonate more than $1.3 billion in annual U.S. trade in North America, Trump announced that he was suspending many of the levies on Mexico and some of them on Canada for a month. This was an expansion of his Wednesday announcement when he exempted auto imports from both countries for 30 days, and it also comes after a previous monthlong tariff reprieve for Canada and Mexico right before they were to take effect Feb. 4.

“Trump is jerking around the entire continent of North America right now, it’s stupid and it has to stop," Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia said. "Today there are businesses that don’t even know if the goods they trade in are subject to Trump’s tariffs. Everything Trump does on trade seems designed to maximize chaos and uncertainty.

Rosenberg and his ergonomic furniture, meanwhile, are contending with a 20% tariff on imports from China – which Trump on Tuesday raised from 10% -- but he’s not sure where the tariff will actually land.

“The misdirection is making it very tough to plan for the year,’’ he said.

Tariffs cause economic pain in part because they’re a tax paid by importers that often gets passed along to consumers, adding to inflationary pressure. They also draw retaliation from trading partners, which can hurt all economies involved.

But import taxes can cause economic damage in another way: by complicating the decisions businesses have to make, including which suppliers to use, where to locate factories, what prices to charge. And that uncertainty can cause them to delay or cancel investments that help drive economic growth.

“It creates an enormous amount of uncertainty for multinational companies that sell products worldwide, that import from the rest of the world, that run these complex supply chains through multiple countries,” said Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University. “The uncertainty is going to be very unsettling for businesses and ... it will hurt business investment.''

During Trump’s first-term trade battles, U.S. business investment weakened late in 2019, convincing the Federal Reserve to cut its benchmark interest rate three times in second half of the year to provide some offsetting economic stimulus.

Trump 2.0 is even more unnerving to business. The first Trump administration imposed tariffs on specific targets — steel and aluminum and most goods from China — after lengthy investigations.

This time, Trump has invoked his power to declare a national emergency — ostensibly over the flow of illegal drugs and immigrants across U.S. borders — to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China with the stroke of a pen. And he’s expanded his targets. Next month, for example, he intends to impose “reciprocal tariffs’’ on countries that charge higher import taxes than America does.

“Just the threat of those tariff increases and potential retaliations are putting a brake on — on investment, on consumption decisions, on employment, hiring, all the rest of it,’’ European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde said after the ECB cut interest rates Thursday to support Europe’s struggling economy.

His tariffs on Canada and Mexico effectively blow up a 2020 North American trade deal he negotiated himself five years ago. “Past trade agreements simply don’t mean much if the president can unilaterally violate them and impose tariffs with no checks at all,” said Douglas Irwin, an economist at Dartmouth College.

Adding to the uncertainty: It’s unclear what Trump is trying to achieve by plastering tariffs on American trading partners. Sometimes he cites border security. Sometimes he emphasizes the revenue that tariffs can generate for the Treasury — money that can help finance his proposed tax cuts. Sometimes he points to America’s big trade deficits with most other countries.

Since the goals are cloudy, it’s hard to see what it will take to make Trump’s tariffs go away.

Not only that, but he’s imposed the tariffs erratically, creating even more confusion. For instance, his administration had to reverse itself last month after ending a customs loophole – the “de minimis” exemption -- allowing duty-free entry into the United States of packages from China and Hong Kong worth less than $800. Turned out, the U.S. postal service needed more time to figure out how to collect the duties.

Businesses are baffled. “I’ve talked to multiple companies that are saying, ‘We’re not moving forward with any investment. We need this to be settled,’” said trade lawyer Gregory Husisian at the law firm Foley & Lardner. At least in Trump’s first term “they knew what the ground rules were. Now they don’t know if we’re playing Monopoly or tic-tac-toe.’’

Respondents to the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing survey, out Monday, voiced complaints about the tariff uncertainty. “There is no clear direction from the administration on how they will be implemented, so it’s harder to project how they will affect business,” a transportation equipment company said. A chemicals firm griped: “The tariff environment regarding products from Mexico and Canada has created uncertainty and volatility among our customers.’’

“Right now, the tariffs are putting everybody off balance because of their unpredictability and uncertainty,” said John Gulliver, president of the New England-Canada Business Council.

Taylor Samuels, the owner of Las Almas Rotas, a bar and restaurant in Dallas, depends on Mexico for much of the alcohol he offers.

The uncertainty surrounding the tariffs, including the potential impact on the price of raw materials like steel and lumber, are forcing him to review his plans to build a new restaurant.

“That construction budget is now under review and may likely be delayed ... as I recalculate costs that have already been budgeted,” he said.

Similarly, Sandya Dandamudi of GI Stone, a stone supplier in Chicago, said builders are having to rethink their plans.

“Developers of commercial projects like high-rises and hotels budget two years in advance, so they don’t account for new tariffs,” she said. “Those budgets will be blown.’’

Dandamudi said that companies will either succeed in passing the tariffs along to their customers or they will be forced to cancel projects.

“The tariffs will be devastating for small businesses like ours,” she said. “Going forward, we won’t be able to sign any new contracts unless clients address the tariffs.”

Holly Seidewand, owner of First Fill Spirits, a shop in Saratoga Springs, New York, that sells Canadian whisky and other specialty spirits, said her plans for the future have been put on hold due to the tariffs. Her original plan for 2025 was to almost double her inventory and the selection she offered.

“For now, we have no plans of adding more shelving or space for new items, we will stick to the footprint we have,” she said. “This will delay the growth of our business, making us a bit stagnant.’’

D’Innocenzio and Anderson reported from New York. Associated Press Staff Writers Rodrique Ngowi in Billerica, Massachusetts and Christopher Rugaber in Washington contributed to this report.

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds a news conference on imposed U.S. tariffs in Ottawa, Ontario, on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (Adrian Wyld /The Canadian Press via AP)

An employee removes American-made wine from their shelves at Bishop's Cellar in Halifax on Wednesday, March 5, 2025. (Darren Calabrese /The Canadian Press via AP)

Canadian Bourbon sits on a shelf at a store in Pittsburgh, Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Avocados imported from Mexico sit at a grocery store in San Francisco, Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Workers harvest cabbage Wednesday, March 5, 2025, on a field less than ten miles from the border with Mexico, in Holtville, Calif. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

A truck loaded with produce from Mexico and Canada passes through Pharr, Texas, Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Isaac Arguelles stocks Mexican-grown green onions at a market as tariffs against Mexico go into effect Tuesday, March 4, 2025, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

In this image made from video, Canadian flag pins are on display at the Whiskeyjack Boutique gift shop Tuesday, March 4, 2025, in Windsor, Ontario. (AP Photo/Mike Householder)

FILE - Trucks loaded with avocados are seen reflected on a rear view mirror as they are escorted by the police on their way to the city of Uruapan, in Santa Ana Zirosto, Michoacan state, Mexico, Jan. 26, 2023. (AP Photo/Armando Solis, File)

FILE - Workers sort avocados at a packing plant in Uruapan, Mexico, Nov. 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Armando Solis, File)