Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series featuring the scripts behind awards season’s buzziest movies continues with I’m Still Here, Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries filmmaker Walter Salles‘ personal political drama from Brazil that just made the Oscar shortlist in the Best International Feature category.
Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega co-wrote the screenplay based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir of the same name set during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the early 1970s. The central figure is Paiva’s mom Eunice, a mother of five who is forced to reinvent herself and her family after her husband Rubens, a politician and engineer who opposed the regime, became one of the government’s desaparecidos (the disappeared), and was tortured and killed.
For Salles, the Portuguese-language film is personal: As a kid knew the Paivas and was friends with their children, with the family’s Rio beach house, which was open to all, one he spent many a day at listening to political discourse and music — an oasis of free thought in a repressive regime. “Their house remains etched in my memory,” he says.
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The story, he says, became more urgent as “during the past seven years we spent creating I’m Still Here life in Brazil veered dangerously close to that past,” he said, adding, “In 2021, a president awarded medals of honor to torturers from that era. This film, conceived before the Bolsonaro years, unfortunately seems not only a film about a past gone by but also a film about the dangers of new forms of authoritarianism that threaten Brazil – not to mention the world.”
I’m Still Here reunites Salles with his Oscar-nominated Central Station and Foreign Land star Fernanda Montenegro and her daughter Fernanda Torres, with whom the filmmaker has worked multiple times. Selton Mello also stars.
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Sony Pictures Classics, which released Central Station, acquired I’m Still Here out of the Cannes market and world premiered it at Venice, where it got a 10-minute ovation and won Salles the director prize and Hauser and Lorega the screenplay prize. It has become a box office hit in Brazil, grossing $10.7 million in the home market through Sunday, making it the year’s top title there. It hits U.S. theaters via SPC on January 17 after picking up a pair of Golden Globe nominations (for International Movie and for Torres), and a Critics Choice nom.
Hauser and Lorega, both with theater credits to their name, previously teamed to write Karim Aïnouz’s Mariner of the Mountains (2021) after Hauser wrote Cannes’ 2019 Un Certain Regard Grand Prix winner Invisible Life.
Read their script below.
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