‘Indefatigable’ would be a good word to describe Fernando Torres’ character in her Oscar-nominated performance in ‘I’m Still Here’. Playing the wife, Eunice Paiva, of a former congressman (and now left-wing dissident) in Brazil, Torres is outstanding in a film which charts the ugly side of dictatorships, in which her husband was one day in 1971 taken away for questioning by the police, and he never returned. Even when she knew that he was likely dead, she continued to strive for his release and was a thorn in the flesh of the military dictatorship which also resulted in her own brush with the rule of law when she, too, was taken, blindfold, for questioning and instructed to identify the faces and names of people deemed subversives who had in the past been over to stay at her house.

This is also a tale of a lost era – hardly one to be nostalgic about, but one infused with the memories of children, one of whom, the son of Eunice Paiva, wrote the memoir on which this film by Walter Salles, himself an acquaintance of the Paiva family, was established. While there is plenty of the political and bureaucratic world of the government of the period, the main focus of this film is one of family, and it is entirely fitting, therefore, that for the first half hour we are privy to a selection of domestic family events, all routine and largely prosaic, in a way that mirrors the dynamics afoot in Oscar-winning ‘Roma’ from 2018 which also gave us an almost documentary-like immersion in the life of a middle class family in 1970s Mexico.

Eunice Paiva is a matriarch, and a control freak, for whom every element of the domestic routine of her family, where she is mother to five children, is done within her purview and, indeed, sanctioned by her. After her husband’s arrest – and she spends the next few decades trying to prove that he was in fact arrested, something the government officially denied – Paiva goes into overdrive, trying to find creative and precise ways of demolishing the formal account of what happened to the husband whose death certificate it takes another quarter of a century to be issued.

In this time, Paiva trains as a lawyer and human rights activist so that she can carry out her own investigation into what happened, and in turn ensure that no other family has to go through the same ordeal. It is her defiance, which also includes her mantra that in any photographs taken of her family by the press they are all smiling, even though on the inside they are going through unspeakable pain, that ensures she carries the torch for freedom when all the odds are stacked against her.

What is remarkable about ‘I’m Still Here’ is that it charts that very paradox between the way we might be expected to behave when the odds are stacked against us and the way we seek to reframe the contours of what is possible in a war that cannot be won through conventional means. At the end, we see Torres’ own mother, Fernanda Montenegro, play Paiva’s older self. Montenegro was the first Brazilian actress to be nominated for an Oscar, back in 1999, in Salles’ ‘Central Station’, and her appearance as the now frail and Alzheimer’s-suffering Paiva is a fitting and satisfying culmination of a journey whose on-screen and off-screen roads here intercut.