{"id":10743,"date":"2025-04-21T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10743"},"modified":"2025-04-20T20:34:07","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T00:34:07","slug":"im-still-here-top-films-of-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/21\/im-still-here-top-films-of-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m Still Here + top films of 2024."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m Still Here<\/em> won the Oscar for Best International Feature this year and earned nominations for Best Picture \u2013 becoming the first Brazilian film to do either of those things \u2013 and a nomination for Best Actress for Fernanda Torres, who delivers a commanding performance as a woman trying to hold her family together after the disappearance of her husband in the police state of Brazil, 1971. Based on the true story of Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens was arrested, tortured, and murdered by the secret police, it shows their beautiful, happy family, and the ways in which Eunice has to swallow her fear and grief to move forward and raise their four children without him. (You can rent it on iTunes<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, etc.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the film opens, we see just faint signs of the terror to come, including a scene where the Paivas\u2019 eldest daughter, Vera, is in a car with friends when they come up against a police roadblock. They\u2019re forced out of the car and roughed up a little as the cops search for \u201cterrorists,\u201d mostly people suspected of engaging in any sort of activities opposing the dictatorship. Rubens is a former congressman who participates in clandestine, peaceful activities like passing letters to families of disappeared people \u2013 dissidents or innocent people \u2013 and coordinating with other like-minded people. They don\u2019t seem to see any risk in their actions, but, of course, one day the secret police come knocking, taking Rubens away and barricading the Paivas in their house for what appears to be a day or two, after which they then take Eunice and another daughter in for interrogation as well. (Vera has gone to study in London and live with another Brazilian family that fled the country out of fear for what was coming.) The daughter is released in a day, but Eunice is kept for nearly two weeks, during which she\u2019s tortured and asked to inform on her husband.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, she\u2019s released, and begins to try to fight through the judicial system first to find out where Rubens is, and then later to get the state to admit they kidnapped and killed him. At the same time, she has four children, three girls and a boy, to raise, while the house\u2019s breadwinner is gone and she finds herself unable to even cash a check because he can\u2019t sign it or call to confirm. The hour or so spent in this time period is by far the strongest, as it focuses entirely on her, and all of the burdens placed on her as a mother, a de facto<\/em> widow, a dissident, and more. It could be a metaphor for modern motherhood and all of the things we ask mothers in western societies to be, including how we ask them to hide or subjugate their own feelings to take care of their families (which reminded me of Jess Grose\u2019s excellent book Screaming on the Inside<\/a><\/em>), although I don\u2019t know if that was intended, since the source material is the Paivas\u2019 son\u2019s memoir, a best-seller in Brazil about ten years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After about 100 minutes, the film jumps forward 25 years to 1996, when Eunice gets word that the death certificate for Rubens has been found. By that point, she has returned to school and become a lawyer, while also making a name for herself as an activist for the families of the disappeared, making this a public event as well as a deeply personal one. Then we get a second flash-forward to shortly before Eunice\u2019s death, a scene that is sentimental and doesn\u2019t need to be in the film at all, although it allowed director Walter Salles to reunite with actress Fernanda Montenegro, who starred in his acclaimed 1998 film Central Station<\/em> \u2026 and who happens to be Torres\u2019s mother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Torres just is this film; the whole endeavor hinges on her performance and she is superb. Any time she is on screen, she owns it \u2013 and the glory is in how subtle Torres\u2019s performance is. There are no big, showy scenes, no giant outbursts, no soliloquies. Had she won the Oscar over Mikey Madison, I wouldn\u2019t object; they\u2019re the two best performances I saw in any 2024 movie, regardless of gender. No other character has half as much to do or matters a tenth as much to the credibility of the story. Once Rubens disappears, you\u2019ll probably suspect we\u2019re not going to see him again even if you don\u2019t know the true story, at which point the script hands everything to Torres and asks her to carry it \u2026 which is pretty much what life did to Eunice Paiva, come to think of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would have given the Best International Feature award to The Seed of the Sacred Fig<\/em>, another film about life under an authoritarian regime, but this was the second-best of the nominees and of all eligible films I saw from 2024. And, if you\u2019re curious, here\u2019s my mostly-final ranking of the best movies I saw from 2024. I haven\u2019t seen No Other Land<\/em>, but I think that\u2019s the only film out there from the 2024 cycle that might crack this list. I\u2019ve seen 43 movies in total that were Oscar-eligible or were released to streaming in 2024, to give you some perspective; #43 was The Apprentice<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Anora<\/a><\/em>
2. Nickel Boys<\/a><\/em>
3. Nosferatu<\/a>
<\/em>4. A Real Pain<\/a><\/em>
5. The Seed of the Sacred Fig<\/a>
<\/em>6. The Brutalist<\/a>
<\/em>7. September 5<\/a><\/em>
8. Hard Truths<\/a><\/em>
9. Sing Sing<\/a><\/em>
10. Daughters<\/a><\/em>
11. Kinds of Kindness<\/a><\/em>
12. Memoir of a Snail<\/a><\/em>
13. I’m Still Here
14. The Room Next Door<\/a><\/em>
15. Sugarcane
16. Challengers
17. I Saw the TV Glow
18. All That We Imagine As Light<\/a><\/em>
19. Kneecap<\/a><\/em>
20. Rebel Ridge<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m Still Here won the Oscar for Best International Feature this year and earned nominations for Best Picture \u2013 becoming the first Brazilian film to do either of those things \u2013 and a nomination for Best Actress for Fernanda Torres, who delivers a commanding performance as a woman trying to hold her family together after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1417,1448,1464,1440,25,1084,161,215],"class_list":["post-10743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2024-movies","tag-2025-best-actress-nominees","tag-2025-best-international-feature-nominees","tag-2025-best-picture-nominees","tag-adaptations","tag-brazilian-films","tag-highly-recommended","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10744,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10743\/revisions\/10744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}