Political films usually make for heavy watching, especially when they’re about the politics of countries that one has little familiarity with. I’m Still Here is an exception. Despite being quite long, it focuses only on the travails of a single family during the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1970s and so is fairly easy to grasp. There are plentiful scenes that show how the happy life of the family was shattered by the father being disappeared by the government. It’s well-made and is a worthy record of this family’s struggle. But it’s probably too conventional and too specific a subject to be of interest to non-Brazilians.

In 1970, the Paiva family enjoys life in a large beachfront home in Rio de Janeiro. The parents Rubens and Eunice are concerned about increasing political instability when the Swiss ambassador is kidnapped by revolutionaries but life is good for their five children. Their son Marcelo has adopted a dog found on the beach and Rubens, an engineer, is building a new house for the family. One evening the eldest daughter Vera is stopped by a military checkpoint while coming home from the cinema. Her parents decide to send her to London to join friends who feel unsafe in Brazil. Not long afterwards, some armed men in plainclothes show up at the house and identify Rubens as a former congressman. They take him to answer some questions but refuse to say where he is being taken. Later in the evening, they take Eunice and the teenaged daughter Eliana as well, forcing them to wear hoods to hide where they are going. In the prison, mother and daughter are separated. Eunice loses sense of time and is repeatedly asked about her husband’s associates and their involvement with pro-democracy activists.

Adapted from a bestselling memoir by the son Marcelo, the events depicted here are obviously based on real life. I’ve written before about how some directors overplay misery by not allowing their characters to experience a single spark of joy. This film goes in the opposite direction by showing extensive scenes of the perfect, blissful daily routines of the Paiva prior to the abduction. The children frolic on the beach and enjoy pop music, Eunice hosts parties and makes soufflé and Rubens is a respected stalwart of society. This is a well-off, upper class household that is not at all representative of the rest of Brazil. The forced disappearances by government thugs are terrifying but it is difficult for us outsiders to place them in their proper context especially for audiences inured by worse horrors. For a long while, I wasn’t even sure that the armed men were actually from the government rather than revolutionaries. Without knowing much about how the military dictatorship of the era, we cannot judge how common or shocking these abductions are. It is only from the reactions of Eunice and others that we realize that this is extremely shocking for Brazil. The point is that in a supposedly law-abiding, civilized country, that such a family would be subjected to this kind of treatment is horrifying.

It is indeed a gross injustice. The procedural, matter-of-fact way that director Walter Salles depicts the escalating events as a kind of terror that creeps up on you. Even when the thugs are right there in their house, Eunice can be seen not quite believing that this is actually happening. Having lived through something similar, I can certainly sympathize with how you’re just caught up in events and instinctively go with the flow despite having zero agency. Part of you feels like screaming at her, why aren’t you making a bigger fuss out of this? Why aren’t you shouting and fighting back? But of course she has to be mindful of the safety of her children and herself. She might glare at the guards as she complies with their orders but comply she does, just as everyone of us will in a similar situation. It’s all very authentic and Fernando Torres deserves all of the plaudits she won for playing Eunice. Still, this is such an obviously privileged family that it’s hard to get too worked up over their fates and Rubens Paiva is just one of many victims of the dictatorship. The extended epilogue covers what happens to the family decades after the father’s disappearance but I’m not sure that it’s of that much interest to most people.

Having their story made into a feature film must be extremely validating for the Paiva family and it surely holds historical value for Brazilians. Yet crass as it sounds, this probably isn’t relevant enough to most of the world. I will note that it was seemingly made for the sensibilities of a kinder world, in which the thugs carrying out orders still feel some shame or the need to hide their deeds. But now we live in an era when fascist governments will proudly boast of the type of detentions and disappearances we see here. Against opposition of this level, legal appeals and angry glaring seem inadequate and powerless.