Retornarán los libros, las canciones
que quemaron las manos asesinas.
Renacerá mi pueblo de su ruina
y pagarán su culpa los traidores.The books will return, the songs
burned by murderous hands.
My people will rise from its ruin
and the traitors will pay for their crimes.
– Pablo Milanés “Yo Pisaré las Calles Nuevamente” (“I Will Walk the Streets Again”)
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It seems worth noting that in the not-quite-decade since a South American nation last won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film – Chile, with Sebastián Leilo’s Una mujer fantástica (A Fantastic Woman, 2017) – the only two movies from the continent to have been nominated for the award (now Best International Feature Film) are historical dramas about the exact same thing. The most recent, Walter Salles’s Ainda estou aqui (I’m Still Here, 2024), focuses on the case of a Brazilian engineer and politician who was apprehended, tortured, and “disappeared” by his nation’s military regime in 1971. It comes on the heels of Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985 (2022), about the trial of that country’s junta, who presided over the torture and murder of tens of thousands during the “Dirty War” of 1976–1983. Both peer into the bleakest periods of their modern histories through the eyes of a nuclear family. Both accomplish, through meticulous, yet quite different, re-creations of a vanished time, a tactile, lived-in, carefully sanitized realism. Crucially for their success, neither one looks to challenge or provoke its audience, preferring instead to lean on the self-assuredness of its moral certitude.
There is a scene in Pablo Larraín’s magisterial No (Chile’s Foreign Film nominee in 2012) in which the protagonist, young publicist René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal), shows a television campaign commercial to a room full of enemies of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. The Pinochet regime has agreed to hold a national referendum, asking the Chilean people whether they wish it to remain in place. A “NO” vote means a return of the military to the barracks and a return of the power of government to civilian hands. Saavedra has been hired to run the “NO” campaign, which everyone expects to lose the vote, and he has chosen to do so with a feel-good message about “the joy that is coming” rather than show the facts of the crimes perpetrated by the regime. His audience in the room – organizers, activists, former prisoners, friends and loved ones of those tortured and murdered – are horrified. “This is a Coca-Cola commercial,” complains one. “This is a campaign of silence,” accuses Ricardo (Alejandro Goic), “All you are is these images of nothing. You are nothing.” The charge hits Saavedra, and the film, right in the heart. Although the “NO” campaign wins the plebiscite and Saavedra’s strategy is vindicated, the emptiness of its message, its ingratiating self-censorship, is plain to see and understood by all. This is a dilemma that the film refuses to resolve, as evidenced by its last shot of a no-longer-celebratory Saavedra, clutching his young son, stepping into the future in uncertainty and fear.
No such moments complicate either Argentina, 1985 or Ainda estou aqui. The moral stakes are clearly established, as in their Chilean predecessor, but unlike that film they also draw unfuzzy lines between good guys and bad guys, between right and wrong choices. I suspect it is this, the black-and-white quality of their shared central question – will the human rights abusers be held accountable for their crimes? – that attracts the interest of its best filmmakers and the sympathies of voting bodies that give out international awards. Few can look upon the chaos, at times horrific, farcical, pathetic, that is contemporary Latin American politics and come up with straightforward narratives, let alone unambiguously good and evil camps. Argentina and Brazil have been putatively democratic for four decades now, yet one finds in the cinema of both, as in their music and literature – or at least the ones that break through internationally – a clinging to that darker yet simpler time, a time of devils, yes, but also of saints, of martyrs, of heroes.
The hero of the Argentine film is Julio César Strassera (Ricardo Darín), the national public prosecutor, charged with leading the case against the generals as Argentina slowly emerges into democracy. The real Strassera served in the post during the Dirty War. He was considered by many opponents of the regime a collaborationist, who refused to fight, for instance, for the issuance of habeas corpus orders demanding the military reveal the location of thousands of political prisoners. This is alluded to in the film with deliberate vagueness, so as not to complicate the audience’s full endorsement of everything Strassera does and says. The fictionalized versions of his wife Silvia (Alejandra Flechner) and children, Verónica and Javier (Gina Mastronicola and Santiago Armas), look up to him as a paragon of integrity and never doubt his pure intentions or his disgust for the generals he served under not too long before.
The story is neatly divided in two. During the preparatory pretrial stage, Strassera’s second-in-command, Luis Moreno Ocampo (Peter Lanzani), and an intrepid band of young lawyers and volunteers collect documents and testimony on the regime’s crimes. Then comes the trial itself, the victims on the stand, the presentation of the evidence, culminating in Strassera’s impassioned speech demanding justice for victims and perpetrators alike. The momentous significance of the proceedings, for Argentina, certainly, but also for the quest to enshrine the primacy of human rights, of human dignity, around the world, is repeatedly, almost rhythmically, conveyed. The first time “in human history” that a civilian court charged and found guilty the heads of a military dictatorship.
Despite a slightly underbaked script – clogged with expository lines uttered exclusively for the audience’s benefit, to which a helpless interlocutor often can only reply “yes, I already knew that” – at its best Argentina, 1985 creates the tension of the finest political thrillers. Will the trial be free and fair? Will the public at large, the silent majority who stayed silent or, worse still, applauded the mano dura (“hard hand”) of the ruling junta, open their eyes and recognize the moral depravity? Will the criminals pay? When they arrive, the answers educate and satisfy. Only the bad people learn anything or change their minds. Moreno Ocampo’s mother Magda (Susana Pampín) is shown turning from patrician disdain for the riffraff who suffered in the military prisons to genuine ire against the victimizers of a young mother (Laura Paredes) who does her best to articulate her unspeakable suffering and humiliation upon giving birth in custody.
A clever strategy is to temper both the darkness and the didacticism with generous servings of dark, deadpan Argentine humor. Flechner, as Strassera’s wife, and young Santiago Armas as their son get some of the choicest lines. But for my money the funniest exchange has Strassera and his old friend Somi (Claudio di Passano)S going over names of legal figures who might agree to join the prosecution’s team. “Salvador?,” Somi suggests. No, replies Strassera. Total facho (“fascist”). “Carrizo?” Fascist. “Dirali?” Fascist. “Bruni?” “Recontra facho” (“super hyper fascist”).
Somi: Hector Alcidez?
Strassera: You kidding? He died last year.
Somi: I didn’t know. That’s awful.
Strassera: Yeah. Massive heart attack. Would’ve said no anyway. Super fascist.
While it lasts, the joy in Ainda estou qqui is broader, more stereotypically Brazilian. The film begins with Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira), the ten-year-old son of Rubens and Eunice Paiva (Selton Mello and Fernanda Torres), adopting a furball mutt off the beach. “Look how cute our new puppy is!” His older sisters, rubbing Coca-Cola on their skins in the hopes of being noticed by the cute boys, are lovingly dismissive. Where Argentina’s Strassera is gruff and black-humored, Rubens Paiva is a jolly, kindly dad, who “drinks whiskey and smokes cigars all day,” who’s louder than his son when they play midnight foosball, who creates secret signals and little rituals with each of his four adoring daughters. Where Mitre colors his Buenos Aires in drab yellows and beiges, often going out of his way to block the sky with concrete high-rises, Salles re-creates 1970s Rio de Janeiro in lively blues and greens. Where the Brazilian film sways and bounces to the musical hits, local and foreign, of the time, the Argentine glides to the notes of Schubert and Wagner, and ends with that seminal Latin-rock anthem of 1970s melancholia, Charly García’s “Inconsciente Colectivo.”
At almost exactly the thirty-minute mark, the first act of Ainda estou aqui ends with a scene of family bliss and a note of foreboding, as Rubens opens the front door and hands a pack of mysterious envelopes to a stranger. Cut to the next morning, the sudden end of the Paiva cosmos. A knock at the door. A band of thugs in plainclothes, perfectly polite – “would the doctor please accompany us for a deposition?” – all silent menace. They take Rubens, who is not seen in person again. Soon enough they take Eunice and their teenage daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski). Thereafter, Ainda estou aqui belongs to Fernanda Torres’s face. As Eunice, Torres becomes her nation personified: manhandled, abused, traumatized. While she portrays the role with studied (at times perhaps overstudied) realism, Salles tasks himself with imbuing her story, all of it contained in that all-too-real, all-too-lived-in face, with mythical significance. Eunice beats no one, succeeds (until the very end) in nothing, and yet the film depends on its audience seeing her not as a martyr, Penelope pining for her lost Odysseus, but as a hero, Penelope and Odysseus in one. Where Argentina, 1985 is a history lesson, Ainda estou aqui is an epic poem, where the hero’s journey is not to or from war but in protecting a home, a family, and finding the courage to fight the system and quest for truth.
Eunice’s direct encounter with the regime – the dark days and nights spent in a dirty cell, the endless interrogation sessions, the hopelessness of uncertainty – “I don’t have that information,” the smirking, perennially smoking bureaucrats of evil constantly reply to her queries – serves the same role as the depositions and testimonies of the victims in Argentina, 1985: a glimpse into the belly of the beast, but only a brief and sidelong one. Eunice is never tortured, never beaten, though she hears through the walls the screams of others being tortured and beaten. She meets many of the types of men who feed the beast – inquisitors armed with Orwellian Newspeak, faceless cadets wiping bloodstains off the floor, even the conflicted soldier who “disapproves” of what is done yet carries on, following orders. Once she is released, the horrors are left offstage. You know what happened, the film says to its audience. You know what was done and who did it.
Perhaps the most poignant similarity between Eunice and her country is an unwillingness to speak the truth out loud. The one time she raises her voice – she raises her hand in anger – is against her daughter Eliana, when she rebukes Eunice’s stubborn silence and placating lies. Eunice learns that Rubens and his friends had in fact been involved with the resistance – though, a colleague of Rubens assures her, “never with the armed resistance” – and kept their wives in the dark to protect them. She sees how this fed her helplessness when trapped by the beast, yet chooses to do to her children what was done to her. “What’s happening?,” demands Vera (Valentina Herszage), the oldest daughter, who was abroad when her father was taken. Eliana, her younger sister, must tell her how it is: “We don’t talk about it here.” The same spirit has been behind Brazil’s series of amnesty laws, the first signed in 1979, that prohibit prosecutions for political crimes committed by members and opponents of the regime. We don’t talk about it here. Not until 1996 did the government admit to having killed Rubens Paiva. Not until 2009, by order of Brazil’s left-wing president, Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva, were any secret police or military files made available to the public.
In 2013, my father went to the archives in São Paolo to request a copy of whatever files existed on him and his brother, both of whom had been university students in the early 1970s and part of the Brazilian armed resistance, which history books often call “the children’s crusade.” The files – hundreds of pages – contain information about dissidents, their aliases, their relatives, their social circles, as well as heavily redacted transcripts of “interrogation sessions” my uncle was subjected to in the middle of the night (the interrogators were careful to note exact beginning and end times). There is a document that explains how the insurrection is at once Communist and Jewish (even though “everyone knows Jews crave only money”). There is no mention of the electric shocks my uncle received while in prison, or of the bribe the authorities took to allow him to go free. But for a more or less cruel overseer, a more or less zealous or connected family member, my uncle could have suffered the fate of Rubens Paiva. Many of his friends did.
“A forced disappearance is one of the cruelest acts,” Eunice tells a group of reporters after the film has jumped twenty-five years forward, “Because you kill one person, and condemn all the rest to eternal psychological torture.” Could anyone, after being patiently led along the Paivas’ ordeal, disagree? Eunice at last, at least, is able to sign to receive Rubens’s death certificate. “Don’t you think,” one reporter asks, “with the return to democracy, that the government have more urgent issues than resolving the past?” “No,” Eunice even smiles, her moral righteousness hard as diamonds, “I think it’s necessary to compensate the families and do the most important thing, elucidate and judge all the crimes committed during the dictatorship.”
Justice for the victims and the perpetrators. Could anything be more morally unproblematic? Certainly not for the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who week after week clamored for the Argentine government to release any new information about their lost loved ones. Certainly not for my father and my uncle, for Eunice Paiva and her family. It is a matter of historical record that Brazil’s military rulers were never brought to court or punished in any significant way. There was no Brazilian Trial of the Juntas. Worse still, a viewer not too well acquainted with recent South American history might be surprised to learn – because Argentina, 1985 brazenly, unforgivably fails to mention it – that the Argentine generals who were found guilty and sentenced to prison in 1985 received full pardons by President Carlos Menem in 1989. So, the answer to both films’ original question – will the criminals pay? – turns out to be no. Indubitably a travesty of justice.
Yet it bears asking, in 2025, whether righting these wrongs of a time increasingly long ago remains “the most important thing.” A viewer not too well acquainted with recent history might suspect from these two high-profile productions that Argentina and Brazil remain enmeshed in these battles – military or civilian, dictatorship or democracy – but this is far from the case. If anything, in 2025, it is the United States that is witnessing the demolishing of democratic institutions, the normalization of masked thugs snatching men, women, and children from their homes or workplaces and incarcerating them, often indefinitely, in inhuman conditions. As I write this, the United States has imposed 50% trade tariffs on Brazil. The express reason, according to President Donald Trump, is the prosecution of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro for trying to overthrow a newly elected government after he lost his reelection campaign.
Bolsonaro, who was (again, openly, explicitly) copying the Trump playbook from January 6, 2021, appears on the surface to be the reincarnation of the military Communist busters of the 1960s and ’70s. But for all his bluster and embrace of militaristic décor, he never had the support of the military brass, who refused his entreaty to join him in toppling the newly reelected Lula. Indeed, Brazil’s old oligarchy could not wait to distance themselves from Bolsonaro, who, much like Trump, is a charlatan and an ignoramus. They rode his coattails when he was elected in 2018, after Lula and his successor, Dilma Rousseff, a survivor of imprisonment and torture by the same regime that killed Rubens Paiva, presided over some of the dirtiest, most corrupt administrations in Brazilian history, which is saying quite a lot. Rousseff was impeached out of the presidency. Lula served prison time. With four decades of electoral democracy on the books, Brazilians fear neither Communist insurgencies nor military coups, but rather the fatal realization that civilian leadership, regardless of party colors, can be as nauseatingly self-serving as what came before.
Argentina has fared no better. Menem, who pardoned the juntas and privatized large swaths of his nation’s government, did so as leader of the Justicialist Party, which was founded by and purportedly continues the political program of Juan Perón. But it was Perón’s widow who was deposed by the generals in 1976, on the (not completely untrue) charge that she was mismanaging the country to the ground. In the 2000s, the Peronists turned leftward again, under the leadership of Nestor Kirchner, who served as president from 2003 and 2007, and then his widow, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who served two terms and was found guilty of corruption while in power, as well as shady dealings with Iran concerning the case of a terrorist attack against a Jewish community center in 1994. She was recently banned for life from holding political office. Argentina’s current President, Javier Milei, anti-Peronist to his core, has a Trumpian personality but economic policies completely antithetical to the American president’s protectionism. He also claims, when faced with difficult decisions, to seek the advice of his English mastiff Conan, dead since 2017, through a medium.
Toward the end of Argentina, 1985, Julio Strassera’s wife bares her heart to her husband. “I will say something to you now that I have never said before. And that I have never said it says a lot. I’m proud of you. Do you know what it means to me, who thought I was married to a grumpy, cynical man, that I am with a national hero? Everyone is saying it. You are a hero of the motherland.” Who are the heroes in today’s Brazil and Argentina? Who are the good guys and who are the bad? Does it even make sense to ask such questions? It says a lot that the region’s two highest-profile films pointedly ignore them. It says a lot, and nothing good.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
