I’m Still Here brings Brazil’s dictatorial past to the surface

“Did we really do it?” Tessa Moura Lacerda asked her mother in disbelief as they stood outside a government facility on a rainy August morning in 2019.

They have in their hands the document for which they have been fighting for years – her father’s death certificate, which clearly states the cause of death.

It said: “unnatural, violent death inflicted by the state on a missing person (…) under the dictatorial regime established in 1964.”

Tessa’s father, Gilda Macedo Lacerda, died under torture in 1973 at the age of just 24, during the most brutal years of Brazil’s military dictatorship.

In more than two decades, at least 434 people have been killed or disappeared, and thousands more have been detained and tortured, the national truth commission has revealed.​​​​

Gilda and Marilús, Tessa’s mother, who was pregnant with her at the time, were arrested on October 22, 1973 in Salvador, Bahia, where they lived in fear of persecution.

They were part of a left-wing group that demanded democracy and sought to destroy military rule.

The dictatorship targeted opposition politicians, union leaders, students, journalists, and virtually anyone who dissented.

Marilus was released after interrogation and torture, but Gilda disappeared.

He is believed to have died six days after their arrest at a military facility in the neighboring state of Pernambuco.

Former inmates told the truth commission that they saw Gild in prison when he was being taken to an interrogation room, where they heard screams that kept them awake at night.

The commission also found documents about his detention.

But newspapers at the time reported that he was shot dead in the street after a disagreement with another member of his political group.

The government will regularly plant false stories in newspapers that are read by large audiences in Brazil and abroad.

Guild’s original death certificate, issued after a 1995 law allowed families to request a missing person’s certificate, did not list a cause of death.

His remains, believed to be in a mass grave with those of other political dissidents, have never been identified.

Tessa, who never met Gilda, said her father’s death was a constant presence in her life.

Growing up, her mother gradually told her more and more about him until she was old enough to learn the brutal details of his death.​​

But the lack of official recognition and the fact that the family did not have time to bury him had a strong impact on her.

“His absence, the absence of his body raised a number of questions,” Tessa told BBC News.​​

“As a child, I thought that maybe he wasn’t dead. I had this fantasy that he managed to escape, and I’m not sure my mother even knew about it.”​​​​

Now, as an adult, she said she still feels like something inside her “broke.”​​

​​For years, she experienced nightmares, could not sleep in the dark, and when she became a mother, she struggled with panic thoughts that something would happen to her children.​​

“I have a physical memory of this fear,” she said.​​​​

“It may seem strange to people, like something supernatural, but it’s not.

“It’s an injury. I was born with it.”

Until the age of 18, Tessa’s birth certificate did not list Gilda as her father, and the family had to go through a lengthy legal battle to prove that he was.

This made correcting her father’s death certificate even more important.

“It’s part of my duty, done,” she said.

“This is not only in memory of my father, but also in the name of all others who disappeared, were killed or tortured during the dictatorship.”

In December, Brazil announced that it would correct the certificates of all recognized victims to acknowledge the state’s role in their deaths.

Until now, only a few families like Tessa could work with the special commission, which was dissolved in 2022 by then-President Jair Bolsonaro and re-established by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2024, to have their certificates amended .

“This is a legal settlement of accounts with the past,” said the president of the Supreme Court of Brazil, Luis Roberto Barroso.

In recent weeks, this violent story has resurfaced in the country after a new film by BAFTA-winning director Walter Sales brought the reality of the dictatorship to the surface.

I’m Still Here, based on the book of the same name by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, tells the story of the author’s mother, Eunice, and her fight for justice after his father, former congressman Rubens Paiva, is tortured and killed.

Eunice has been waiting for her husband’s death certificate for 25 years.

Without it, she had no access to the family’s bank accounts and had to rebuild her life.

She died in 2018 without knowing exactly what happened to her husband in his final hours and without being able to bury him.

Fernando Torres, who plays Eunice in the film, last week won Brazil’s first Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her performance in the film – and many hope to see her on the Oscar nominations list later this month.

She told BBC News that she admires Eunice very much.

“This is a woman who did not seek recognition for herself for a single second of her life… She wanted her husband’s death to be recognized.

“Although the world is changing, this absence has never been healed,” she added.

“How are you going to tell these families, ‘Just forget it.’ Sweep your dead under the rug?”

Although I’m Still Here is mostly set in the years of the dictatorship, it resonates deeply with Brazilians today.

Brazil is a very divided country, and its politics have become extremely polarized.

In recent years, there has been an increase in extreme rhetoric and attempts to rewrite the narrative around the dictatorship.

In 2016, a group of protesters stormed the Congress calling for the return of military rule. Three years later, Bolsonaro is the Minister of Education ordered history textbooks to be reworkeddenying the overthrow of the democratic government in 1964. was a coup d’état.

Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has praised the former dictatorship and held events commemorating the coup while in office.

More recently, Bolsonaro and some of his closest allies were officially accused of allegedly preparing a coup d’état after he lost the 2022 presidential election.

The former president never publicly acknowledged his defeat and his supporters, who refused to accept the result, stormed Congress, the presidential palace and the Supreme Court on January 8, 2023.

Sales told the BBC that the current political situation in Brazil is part of why now is the right time to make the film.

“What is unusual about literature, music, film and art is that they are tools against forgetting,” he said.

Brazilians closely associated with the story describe leaving the cinema in tears after watching the film.

Marta Costa, whose aunt Helenira was murdered in 1972, said she wanted to run out of the séance.

“You imagine your family being locked up in a hood and being tortured like that,” she told BBC News.

“When Eunice tells her story, she also tells mine; when I tell my aunt’s story, I tell theirs too. You can’t separate one from the other,” she said.

Marta is making a documentary about Helenira and her years of resistance, but the family still doesn’t know much about her disappearance and death. Helenira’s body was also not found.

“It’s a cursed legacy because we have to keep passing the baton from generation to generation until we can ensure that its memory lives on, that the story is told as it really happened.”

Now, 52 years after her murder, Heleniri’s family will receive a certificate that acknowledges the harsh reality of her death.

Its importance, Martha says, is immeasurable.

“The day we receive this certificate, it is as if the state recognizes its role and apologizes.

“This is the first step so that we can start again.”

While the certificates are a step forward, both Tessa and Martha say the families of the victims have a long way to go in their fight for justice.

The amnesty law, which remains in place, means that none of the military officials who were in power at the time, or those accused of torture and murder, have been brought to justice. Many have already died.

There was no official apology from the government or the military.

“Brazilian society needs to recognize this history so that these deaths are not in vain,” Tessa said.

“If we don’t work to clear up this history, if we don’t acknowledge our pain,” Martha said, “we will always be at risk of it happening again.”

The wounds of the dictatorship, according to Tessa, are a national trauma.

But for her, as for Martha and Eunice, it is also a deeply personal story.

“I will not stop fighting until the end of my days,” she said.

– I will bury my father.

I’m Still Here opens in UK cinemas on 21 February 2025