“I’m Still Here” (“Ainda Estou Aqui” in the original Portuguese) surprised some by being included in the Academy Awards nominations for Best Motion Picture, but perhaps no one who had seen it. This Brazilian film is set primarily in that country’s authoritarian military regime, expressly, what is considered just about the height of that regime’s power in 1970-1971. Director Walter Salles is perhaps best known in the US up to this point for his early 2000’s “The Motorcycle Diaries,” about an adventurous young Che Gueverra discovering his political conscience. Like that Spanish-language film, “I’m Still Here” mixes personal and political awakenings, but the camera lens is focused much more intimately on the life of one impacted family. Where “diaries” sometimes felt like a documentary reconstruction of events, the still-true-to-life events in “I’m Still Here” are very effectively intimate.

The year 1970 progressed for the Paiva family, as expected for the upper-class Paiva family in Rio. They live near the beach, and the family patriarch, Rubens (Selton Mello), is busy working. The family is planning to build and then move into a new home. The Paivas’ oldest daughter is preparing to depart for the UK with some anxious friends of Dad, and we have become aware that the political situation in the country is fraught. Opponents of the military regime have kidnapped foreign dignitaries, and there has been a crackdown and chilling effect on left-of-center families like the Paivas. As life attempts to continue as usual, Rubens becomes involved in some light politics and ultimately disappears into shady custody. The government denies his arrest, and at this point, the fulcrum of the film pivots.

For the rest of the film, Fernanda Torres, as Eunice Paiva, portrays the dignity and resilience of a mother and wife struggling for justice in an unfair world. It is undoubtedly one of the most complex and evocative performances of 2024, and her Academy Nomination for Best Actress (and Gold Globe win) is not misplaced. Because so many of the Paiva children are young, it is necessary to hide some of the more unsavory details of Ruben’s disappearance, allowing Torres to demonstrate restraint in her release of reaction to the news that should be devastating or enraging, a rage, and devastation we feel, see in her eyes, but with a face ably not revealing the unknown to the children in the scene. Eunice remains the moral core of the family and plot and subtly defies the expectations of an aggrieved wife in all three acts. In one incredibly subtle piece of acting, Torres’ Eunice agrees to expose her husband’s disappearance in a very risky magazine. While the magazine’s photographer demands they appear sad, Eunice tells her family to smile defiantly in the face of what they endure, for all of Brazil to see.

“I’m Still Here” is a testament to the durability of family and the resilience of strong people in the face of unimaginable adversity. It is an anthem for those who are strong in character. In a world where sometimes the arc of justice bends too slowly, women like Eunice Paiva, captured so perfectly with Fernanda Torres’s determined eyes, grab that arc and curve it.