They came for Rubens Paiva one Wednesday lunchtime in January 1971, barging into his beachfront home in Rio and carting him off – to where nobody knew.
“I didn’t have even the slightest idea what was going to happen. Much less that my sister and my mother would be arrested the next day. It was a terrifying feeling,” recalled the engineer and politician’s son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, who was 11 at the time.
After a short but frightful stay in a torture centre run by Brazil’s military dictatorship, Paiva’s female relatives were released. But his 41-year-old father would never return. Authorities only acknowledged his murder 25 years later, when a death certificate was issued. Paiva’s remains were never found.
The abduction and murder of Rubens Paiva – one of the most notorious crimes of the 1964-85 regime – is retold in a new box office hit by the Golden Globe-winning film-maker Walter Salles, whose cast includes the grande dame of Brazilian cinema, Fernanda Montenegro.
I’m Still Here, which is based on a book by Marcelo Rubens Paiva of the same name, has struck a chord in a country still wrestling with the legacy and political consequences of its 21-year dictatorship. Nearly 2 million people have watched it at cinemas since its release in early November. Paiva’s 2015 book has shot up lists of bestsellers.
How did it begin?
Brazil’s leftist president, João Goulart, was toppled in a coup in April 1964. General Humberto Castelo Branco became leader, political parties were banned, and the country was plunged into 21 years of military rule.
The repression intensified under Castelo Branco’s hardline successor, Artur da Costa e Silva, who took power in 1967. He was responsible for a notorious decree called AI-5 that gave him wide ranging dictatorial powers and kicked off the so-called “anos de chumbo” (years of lead), a bleak period of tyranny and violence which would last until 1974.
What happened during the dictatorship?
Supporters of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military regime - including Jair Bolsonaro - credit it with bringing security and stability to the South American country and masterminding a decade-long economic “miracle”.
It also pushed ahead with several pharaonic infrastructure projects including the still unfinished Trans-Amazonian highway and the eight-mile bridge across Rio’s Guanabara bay.
But the regime, while less notoriously violent than those in Argentina and Chile, was also responsible for murdering or killing hundreds of its opponents and imprisoning thousands more. Among those jailed and tortured were Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, then a leftwing rebel.
It was also a period of severe censorship. Some of Brazil’s best-loved musicians - including Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso - went into exile in Europe, writing songs about their enforced departures.
How did it end?
Political exiles began returning to Brazil in 1979 after an amnesty law was passed that began to pave the way for the return of democracy.
But the pro-democracy “Diretas Já” (Direct elections now!) movement only hit its stride in 1984 with a series of vast and historic street rallies in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte.
Civilian rule returned the following year and a new constitution was introduced in 1988. The following year Brazil held its first direct presidential election in nearly three decades.
Chillingly, the film’s release has coincided with the publication of a federal police report showing how close Brazil came to being plunged back into military rule, just two years ago.
Police claim the far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro – a notorious champion of the dictatorship and of torture – oversaw a murderous conspiracy to seize power after losing the 2022 election to his leftwing rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro has denied the police allegations.
“It’s proof that the page hasn’t been turned on this part of history – that it hasn’t been overcome,” Paiva said of the accusations against Bolsonaro, which include claims that plotters planned to abduct or assassinate the ex-president’s rivals.
“Why hasn’t it been overcome? Because there were no convictions, there was no reparation [after the dictatorship],” argued Paiva, whose father’s killers were never brought to justice. “So long as these things are not punished, our democracy will always be under threat.”
Several of those accused of conspiring with Bolsonaro were part of the 1964 regime, including Augusto Heleno, an elderly general who was a minister in his 2018-2023 government. “They’re the same characters,” Paiva said. Heleno has yet to comment on the claims he was involved.
At the heart of Salles’s film, which has left many filmgoers in tears, is the Paiva family home: an airy beach house near Ipanema where Paiva and his wife Eunice raised their five children.
“I wanted to show that, just as it happened to our family, this could have happened to any other family – and it did. It happened to thousands of other families,” said Paiva, 65. “We always thought this had to be a film about family … a family that wants to be happy but can’t be because of the incongruities of political madness.”
Paiva remembers his father, a congressman whose political career was cut short by the 1964 coup that kickstarted the dictatorship, as a “happy, fun guy” with “an incredible laugh”.
In the months before his abduction, he would take furtive strolls along the beach with British and French newspaper correspondents, “to tell them what was going on”. The early 1970s were one of the most repressive moments of the dictatorship and the heavily censored local press was unable to expose the abuses of the regime.
Paiva was not involved in the armed resistance to the dictatorship, his son said. Even so, he was snatched from his home and, the next day, beaten to death.
Paiva’s disappearance shatters the domestic bliss depicted in the film’s opening moments and sets up a drama that is both profoundly Brazilian and hauntingly universal.
The film’s soundtrack features songs by legendary composers, several of whom were jailed or forced into exile by the dictatorship, like Tom Zé and Caetano Veloso. But the gut-wrenching portrayal of a family destroyed by the ideologically driven fancies of an authoritarian regime evokes similar tragedies that continue to play out, from Beijing to Caracas. “What happens in China, happens in Ukraine. It’s happening now in Venezuela. It happens everywhere,” said Paiva.
After Rubens Paiva’s forced disappearance, his wife – played by actor and writer Fernanda Torres – takes centre stage, battling to shield their children from the horror that has transpired as she seeks answers about a husband she is unable to grieve. Torres’s poignant portrayal of Eunice’s struggle has prompted calls for her to be given the 2025 Oscar for best actress.
Paiva thought the film’s success was partly explained by a thirst for information about the dictatorship by young Brazilians born after democracy returned. He recalled witnessing similar scenes in Germany in the early 90s, when audiences packed cinemas to watch Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. “My [German] friends said to me: ‘My parents didn’t talk about this. My grandparents didn’t talk about this.’ It was a generation that was discovering what had happened in its country.”
Paiva believes the re-election of Donald Trump – who has vowed to be a dictator on “day one” of his presidency – made the Brazilian film even more relevant. “I think people are afraid. Now even more so with Trump,” he said. “The world has become something we [thought we] had already left behind.”
