Walter Salles’ latest film “I’m Still Here”, which recently won a Best International Film Oscar, calmly but powerfully observes a real-life personal struggle under the dictatorship period in Brazil during the early 1970s. While never overlooking the grim and horrific aspects of that time, the movie stays focused on small but resonating human moments along the story, and these intimate moments become all the more poignant to us as the story eventually arrives at its two-part epilogue.

The story begins with how things were mostly fine for Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) and his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and their five children in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during December 1970. The country has been under the military dictatorship for years since the 1964 Brazilian coup d’état, and Rubens and his family had to go through a brief period of exile due to his left-wing political career during that time. However, he is now back in his old civil career as focusing more on his family’s welfare, and we see how he and his family happily go through their mundane daily life together.

However, the political circumstance of their country gets more volatile day by day, and both Rubens and Eunice become more aware of the possible danger around their family and many others around them. When a close friend of theirs are about to move to London for safety, they decide to have their eldest daughter move to London along with that friend, because they are afraid that she may get into any serious trouble for becoming more politically active just like many other young people in the country.

Meanwhile, Eunice also comes to notice that her husband has been hiding something behind his back. He sometimes has a phone conversation in private while not telling anything about that to her, but Eunice does not ask too much as taking care of the rest of their children after their eldest daughter eventually leaves for London.

And then something unexpected happens on one day. Several guys suddenly come into Ruben and Eunice’s house, and Ruben is soon taken away to somewhere just because he needs to be interrogated for some unspecified reason. As those guys start to watch over her and her children at the house, Eunice begins to fear for the worst, but those guys do not tell anything about why her husband was taken away or when he will be back, so she has no choice but to wait while also protecting her children from the ongoing circumstance to some degree.

In the end, Eunice is also taken away to somewhere along with her second eldest daughter, and what follows next is the darkest part of the story. Although the movie depicts Eunice and her daughter’s following plight with considerable restraint, that is more than enough for us to be disturbed and chilled by the brutal political horror surrounding their circumstance.

Fortunately, Eunice and her daughter are eventually released, but her husband remains missing as before. While the government refuses to admit anything about his disappearance, Eunice decides to search for anything which may help her find her husband, but, of course, it becomes more apparent to her that her husband will never return, and she and her children soon find themselves monitored by some suspicious people who may be government agents.

The screenplay by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, which is based on the memoir of the same name written by Marcelo Rubens Paiva (He is one of Eunice’s five children, by the way) and received the Best Screenplay award when the movie was premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in last year, wisely sticks to its restrained attitude even at this point. While there are a few melodramatic moments as expected later in the story, the movie patiently follows how much Eunice struggles in one way or another as continuing to search for any information about her husband, and we come to admire her will and determination more when she eventually makes a big decision for herself as well as her children.

Everything in the movie depends a lot on the beautifully nuanced performance of Fernanda Torres, who was deservedly nominated for Best Actress Oscar (The movie was also nominated for Best Picture Oscar, by the way). Subtly conveying her character’s growing worry and desperation to us, Torres gradually takes the center along the story, and her excellent acting comes to function as the heart and soul of the film.

Around Torres, several main cast members have each own moment to shine. While Selton Mello is well-cast as Eunice’s decent husband, Guilherme Silveira, Valentina Herszage, Luiza Kosovski, Barbara Luz, and Cora Mora hold their respective spots well as Eunice’s five children, and Fernanda Montenegro, who is Torres’ mother and known to most of us mainly for her Oscar-nominated performance in Salles’ 1998 film “Central Station” (1998), makes a brief but effective appearance during the epilogue of the movie.

On the whole, “I’m Still Here” is seemingly plain but undeniably absorbing thanks to several commendable aspects including its thoughtful storytelling and the strong lead performance. Although he has been rather silent since his previous feature film “On the Road” (2012), Salles demonstrates here that he has not lost any of his talent yet, and, in my trivial opinion, the result is his best work since “Central Station”. As I heard from many others, this is indeed one of the main highlights of last year, and I wholeheartedly recommend you to check it out as soon as possible.