‘I’m Still Here’: Read The Screenplay For Walter Salles’ Personal Political Drama That Warns To Never Forget The Disappeared

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Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series featuring the scripts behind awards season’s buzziest movies continues with I’m Still Here, Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries filmmaker Walter Salles‘ personal political drama from Brazil that just made the Oscar shortlist in the Best International Feature category.

Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega co-wrote the screenplay based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir of the same name set during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the early 1970s.

The central figure is Paiva’s mom Eunice, a mother of five who is forced to reinvent herself and her family after her husband Rubens, a politician and engineer who opposed the regime, became one of the government’s desaparecidos (the disappeared), and was tortured and killed.

For Salles, the Portuguese-language film is personal: As a kid knew the Paivas and was friends with their children, with the family’s Rio beach house, which was open to all, one he spent many a day at listening to political discourse and music — an oasis of free thought in a repressive regime. “Their house remains etched in my memory,” he says. RELATED: ‘I’m Still Here’ Review: Walter Salles’ Love Letter To Brazil Is A Powerful Warning From History The story, he says, became more urgent as “during the past seven years we spent creating I’m Still Here life in Brazil veered dangerously close to that past,” he said, adding, “In 2021, a president awarded medals of honor to torturers from that era.