I’m Still Here brings to light the past of Brazil’s dictatorship

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

In their hands, the document they had fought over for years: his father’s death certificate, which now correctly states 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 at the age of 24, during the most brutal years of Brazil’s military dictatorship.

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

Gildo and Mariluce, the mother of Tessa, who was pregnant with him at the time, were arrested on October 22, 1973 in Salvador, Bahia, where they lived for fear of persecution.

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

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

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 facility in the nearby state of Pernambuco.

The ex-detainees told the truth commission that they saw Gildo in prison, he was taken to an interrogation room where they heard screams that kept him awake at night.

The commission also found documents referring to his arrest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the lack of official recognition and the fact that the family did not get to bury it had a big impact on him.

“Her absence, the absence of her body, brought up a series of questions,” Tessa told BBC News.

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s trauma. I was born with it.”

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

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

“It’s part of my duty,” he said.

“It’s not just in memory of my father, but in the name of all the others who disappeared, were killed or tortured during the dictatorship.”

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

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

“It is a legitimate settlement of past accounts,” said Luís Roberto Barroso, head of Brazil’s Supreme Court.

In recent weeks, a national conversation about this violent history has reignited after a new film by BAFTA-winning director Walter Salles brought to light the realities of the dictatorship.

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 the torture and death of her father, former congressman Rubens Paiva.

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

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

She died in 2018 without knowing exactly what happened to her husband in the last hours, and without being able to bury her.

Fernanda Torres, who plays Eunice in the film, She won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in Brazil last week for his part in the film – and many are hoping to see him on the Oscar nominations list later this month.

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

“She is a woman who has never spent a second of her life seeking recognition for herself… She wanted recognition for her husband’s death.

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

“How are you going to tell these families, ‘Forget it. Sweep your dead under the carpet?'”

Although I’m Still Here is mostly set during the dictatorship, it still resonates with Brazilians today.

Brazil is a very divided country, and its politics are very polarized.

In recent years, there has been an increase in extremist rhetoric and efforts to rewrite the narrative of the dictatorship.

In 2016, a group of protesters attacked Congress demanding the return of military rule. Three years later, Bolsonaro’s Minister of Education he ordered a revision of the history booksThe denial of the overthrow of the democratic government in 1964 was a coup d’état.

Bolsonaro is a former army captain he praised the former dictatorship and held events to commemorate the coup d’état during his tenure.

Recently, Bolsonaro and some of his closest allies They have been formally accused of allegedly organizing a coup d’état After losing the 2022 presidential election.

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

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

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

Brazilians closely related to the story have described leaving cinemas in tears after seeing the film.

Marta Costa, whose aunt Helenira was killed in 1972, said she wanted to finish the show.

“You see your family was hooded and tortured in that way,” he told BBC News.

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

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

“Heritage is cursed because we must continue to pass the reins from generation to generation, until we can ensure that his memory is preserved, that history is told as it really happened.”

Helenira’s family, 52 years after her death, will receive a certificate acknowledging the brutal reality of her death.

Its importance, Marta says, is immeasurable.

“The day we receive that certificate, it’s like the state admits its role and apologizes.

“For us it is the first step to be able to start again.”

While 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 in power at the time has been prosecuted or accused of torture and killings. Many have already died.

There has been no formal apology from the government or the military.

“Brazilian society must recognize this history, so that these deaths do not become unnecessary,” said Tessa.

“If we don’t work to clarify this history, to acknowledge our pain,” said Marta, “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 him, like Marta and Eunice, it is also a very personal history.

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

“I will bury my father.”

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