What Happened To Rubens Paiva?

I’m Still Here, entitled Ainda Estou Aqui in the Portuguese language, is a masterful political thriller disguised as a family drama, which ends in uplifting fashion for its protagonist Eunice Paiva. From living a seemingly idyllic life with her husband Rubens and children in a wealthy beachfront neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Eunice’s world is thrown into turmoil when Rubens is taken away by a group of mysterious men from the Brazilian army. She’s told that he’s going to give a “deposition”, and that he’ll be back at home within a few hours.

Instead, she’s already said goodbye to Rubens for the last time. The Paiva children will never see their father again. They’re left in the nightmarish limbo of not knowing what’s happened to him, but not being able to speak about it under the repressive conditions of Brazil’s military dictatorship, a scenario which also inspired Terry Gilliam’s satirical sci-fi movie Brazil. Eunice Paiva is burdened with managing her new reality as a single mother to five children without a stable income, while coming to terms with the disappearance of her husband and her interrogation at the hands of his all-powerful captors.

What Happens to Rubens Paiva In I’m Still Here

He’s Made To Disappear By Brazil’s Military Dictatorship

Although the true story of Rubens Paiva’s disappearance is at the center of I’m Still Here’s plot, what happens to him is never actually presented onscreen in the movie. That’s probably for the best, as we get hints of his horrifying ordeal during the scenes in which Eunice and her daughter Eliana are taken to a military base for interrogation. We hear the screams of other prisoners being tortured, while Eunice sees blood stains on the floor of her interrogation room.

Meanwhile, news stories proliferate in Brazil that Rubens Paiva has escaped and is no longer in the hands of the state. When Eunice is being interrogated, she’s told that her husband is “upstairs” from the room she’s in. Her daughter’s teacher, who was assisting political exiles alongside Rubens, claimed to have heard him saying his name in her vicinity during her own imprisonment by the army. None of the stories seem to match up, and it’s clear that Brazil’s military regime is hiding something.

In the months after her release, a political activist and friend of her husband comes to Eunice’s house to tell her what’s really happened to her husband. He’s been killed in army custody, according to reports coming from within the state. The president of Brazil himself, Emílio Médici, who’s also head of the military junta, apparently confirmed Rubens Paiva’s death to insiders. When Eunice asks, “And the body?”, her husband’s friend is unable to give her a clear answer. What’s clear is that Paiva’s body has been disposed of in a way that can’t incriminate anyone in the regime.

Was Rubens Paiva’s Body Ever Found?

It Was Hidden As Evidence That Would Incriminate The Regime

As I’m Still Here explains in its postscript, Rubens Paiva’s body has never been recovered. There were attempts to find his remains in a shallow grave in 1987, but it turned out that the Brazilian military had already exhumed them and thrown them into the sea off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, 14 years earlier (via O Globo).

The dictatorship is known to have killed more than 400 people for political reasons, with a huge proportion of these deaths occurring during Médici’s five-year rule, which is when Paiva disappeared. Many of these victims ended up in mass, unmarked graves, or were disposed of at sea, as Rubens Paiva appears to have been.

How & Why Eunice Paiva Obtains Her Husband’s Death Certificate

She’s Instrumental In Passing A Law That Provides Closure For Her Family

Without their bodies ever being found, Brazil’s victims of forced disappearances during the dictatorship were still legally considered alive for decades after they’d last been seen. Rubens Paiva, for example, was supposedly a missing person even though his case file was closed within a few months of him going missing. Eunice Paiva and her family weren’t even able to grieve properly, as their husband and father wasn’t officially dead. What’s more, the family was left without a stable source of income, as they didn’t have access to Rubens’ bank accounts without proof that he was no longer alive.

For these reasons, as we see in I’m Still Here, Eunice Paiva fought for decades to obtain her husband’s death certificate. She even qualified as a lawyer to strengthen her cause, and played a major role in a law being enacted which acknowledges the deaths of her husband and other political dissidents during the dictatorship.

The moment in which Eunice receives Rubens’ death certificate in I’m Still Here, as a result of the law that she’d helped to pass, is an uplifting, if painful, conclusion to her decades of suffering. The document is hard evidence that the state killed Rubens Paiva, officially putting an end to any questions around his death and who caused it. It’s also recognition of the terrible wrong done to Eunice and her family, who suffered 25 years of “psychological torment”, as she describes it, for the sake of a regime looking to cover up its crimes.

What Condition Eunice Paiva Has At The End Of The Movie

She’s Unable To Speak And Doesn’t Seem Aware Of Her Surroundings

The portrayal of Eunice Paiva, played by Oscars dark horse Fernanda Torres, finally receiving her husband’s death certificate in 1996 could have been a triumphant – if bittersweet – moment for I’m Still Here to end on. Instead, the movie continues with a further epilogue, in which we see Eunice at the age of 85, unable to speak, or move around without assistance.

Anyone with a family member who’s experienced some form of dementia will recognize Eunice’s symptoms. It’s clarified in the film’s postscript that she lived with Alzheimer’s disease from 2003 until her death. There’s the hint in the 1996 segment of I’m Still Here that Eunice was already beginning to lose her memory at that time, as she struggles to count some banknotes. However, there’s no evidence to support the idea that she developed Alzheimer’s as early as the mid 1990s.

How Much Of I’m Still Here Is Actually True

The Movie Is Mostly Faithful To The True Story It’s Based On

Aside from this minor detail, and a fictionalized scene in which Eunice is told unofficially about her husband’s death in 1971, the overwhelming majority of I’m Still Here is entirely true. The movie is based on the 2015 memoirs of Marcelo Paiva, the son of Eunice and Rubens who features as one of its characters, which is also entitled Ainda Estou Aqui. The film stays faithful to its source material throughout, with minor dramatic embellishments largely making no difference to the overall story.

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On the other hand, the movie version of I’m Still Here does shift its focus from Marcelo Paiva’s perspective. It places Eunice Paiva, the person at the heart of his memoir, front-and-center as the protagonist of the entire story. The ending of the film isn’t about Rubens Paiva, who was his family’s first victim of Brazil’s military dictatorship. It’s about his wife, Eunice, who was still there, left to try and carry on with raising a family despite what had happened to her husband, reliving his victimhood as her own for the remainder of her life.

Source: O Globo

Movie

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I’m Still Here

7/10

Release Date

November 20, 2024

Runtime

137 Minutes

Director

Walter Salles

Writers

Walter Salles, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Murilo Hauser, Heitor Lorega

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  Fernanda Torres

  Eunice Paiva

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  Selton Mello

  Rubens Paiva