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

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

​​In their hands, a document they fought for for years: their father’s death certificate, which now correctly indicates the cause of his death.

It said: “unnatural and violent death caused by the State to a missing person (…) in the dictatorial regime established in 1964.”

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

Over more than two decades, at least 434 people were killed or disappeared, and thousands more were detained and tortured, a national truth commission concluded.

Gildo and Mariluce, 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 being persecuted.

​​They were part of a left-wing group that demanded democracy and sought to overthrow the military government.

​​The dictatorship attacked opposition politicians, union leaders, students, journalists and almost anyone who expressed their disagreement.

Mariluce was released after being interrogated and tortured, but Gildo disappeared.

He is believed to have died six days after his arrest, at a military installation in the nearby state of Pernambuco.

Former detainees told the truth commission that they saw Gildo in prison, being taken to an interrogation room where they could hear screams that kept them awake at night.

​​The commission also found documents citing his arrest.

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

​​The government routinely placed false narratives in newspapers read by large audiences in Brazil and internationally.

​​Gildo’s original death certificate, issued after a 1995 law allowed families to request the document for the missing, left the cause of his death blank.

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

Tessa, who never met Gildo, said her father’s death had been a constant presence in her life.

As she grew older, her mother gradually told her more and more about him until she was old enough to know the brutal details of how he died.

But the lack of official recognition and the fact that the family was never able to bury him had a profound impact on her.

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

“When I was a kid, I thought maybe he hadn’t died. I had this fantasy that he’d managed to escape, and I’m not sure my mom even knew that.”

Now, as an adult, she said she still feels like there is something “broken” inside her.

For years, she experienced nightmares, couldn’t sleep in the dark, and when she became a mother, she struggled with panicked thoughts that something would happen to her children.

“It’s like I have a bodily memory of this fear,” he said.

“People may find it strange, like something supernatural, but it’s not.

“It’s a trauma. I was born with it.”

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

This made correcting his father’s death certificate an even more important task.

“It’s part of my duty fulfilled,” he said.

“It is not only in memory of my father, but in the name of all the others who disappeared, murdered or tortured during the dictatorship.”

​​In December, Brazil announced that it would rectify the certificates of all recognized victims to recognize the role of the State in their deaths.

​​Until now, only a few families like Tessa’s had been able to work with a special commission, dissolved in 2022 by the then president, Jair Bolsonaro, and reinstated by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2024, to have their certificates modified.

“It is a legitimate reckoning with the past,” said the president of Brazil’s Supreme Court, Luís Roberto Barroso.

In recent weeks, a national conversation has been sparked about this violent history after a new film by BAFTA-winning director Walter Salles brought the realities 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 her father, former congressman Rubens Paiva, was tortured and murdered.

Eunice waited 25 years for her husband’s death certificate.

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 last hours, and without being able to bury him.

Fernanda Torres, who plays Eunice in the film, won Brazil’s first Golden Globe for Best Actress last week for her role in the film, and many expect to see her on the Academy Awards nomination list later this month.

He told BBC News that he had great admiration for Eunice.

“She is a woman who never dedicated a second of her life to seeking recognition for herself… She wanted her husband’s death to be recognized.

“Even though the world changed, that absence was never healed,” he added.

“How are you going to tell these families, ‘Forget it, hide your dead under the rug’?”

Even though I’m Still Here was primarily developed during the years of the dictatorship, it resonates deeply with Brazilians today.

Brazil is an extremely divided country and its politics have become excessively polarized.

Recent years have seen a rise in extreme rhetoric and efforts to rewrite the narrative around the dictatorship.

In 2016, a group of protesters broke into Congress. calling for a return to military government. Three years later, Bolsonaro’s Education Minister ordered the revision of history textbooksdeny that the overthrow of the democratic government in 1964 had been a coup d’état.

Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has praised the former dictatorship and held commemorative events of the coup during his mandate.

More recently, Bolsonaro and some of his closest allies have been formally charged with allegedly plotting a coup d’état after losing the 2022 presidential election.

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

Salles told the BBC that the current state of politics in Brazil was part of the reason why now was the right time to make the film.

“The extraordinary thing about literature, music, cinema and the arts is that they are instruments against oblivion,” he said.

Brazilians with close ties to the story have described leaving theaters in tears after seeing the film.

Marta Costta, whose aunt Helenira was murdered in 1972, said she wanted to miss out on the screening.

“Can you imagine your family being hooded and tortured like that,” he told BBC News.

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

Marta is making a documentary about Helenira and her years of resistance, but there are many things the family still does not know about her disappearance and death. Helenira’s body was never recovered either.

“It is a cursed inheritance, because we have to continue passing the baton from generation to generation, until we can ensure that its memory is preserved, that the story is told how it really happened.”

Helenira’s family will now receive, 52 years after her murder, a certificate that recognizes the brutal reality of her death.

Its importance, says Marta, is immeasurable.

“The day we received that certificate, it is as if the State recognized its role and apologized.

“It’s the first step so we can start again.”

Although the certificates are a step forward, both Tessa and Marta say grieving families have a long way to go in their fight for justice.

An amnesty law, which remains in force, means that none of the military officers in power at the time nor those accused of torture and murder have been prosecuted. Many have already died.

There has been no formal 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 clarify this history, to acknowledge our pain,” Marta said, “we will always be at risk of it happening again.”

The wounds of the dictatorship, in Tessa’s words, are a national trauma.

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

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

“I will bury my father.”

I’m Still Here will be released in UK cinemas on February 21, 2025.