EXCLUSIVE: Walter Salles will direct and Mariana Lima will star in I’m Nonetheless Right here, based mostly on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s best-selling memoir about his mom Eunice Paiva, a housewife pressured to reinvent herself as an activist when her husband fell sufferer to the army regime that took management of Brazil in 1964. Her husband grew to become amongst many who have been tortured and disappeared with no due course of.
Mariana Lima, one in every of Brazil’s most acclaimed actresses with credit that embody Darkish Days and Father’s Chair, will play Paiva. Murilo Hauser, who scripted the 2019 Un Sure Regard winning-Invisible Life, tailored the screenplay, with Salles overseeing the event course of.
Videofilmes, Mact, and RT Options are producing.
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CAA Indicators Award Profitable ‘Central Station’ & ‘The Motorbike Diaries’ Filmmaker Walter Salles
The movie is ready to start manufacturing in Brazil early subsequent 12 months, with Library Photos Worldwide offering financing. CAA Media Finance will dealer home distribution whereas Wild Bunch is dealing with worldwide gross sales, excluding Brazil. The sellers will introduce the venture by way of an in-person presentation to patrons on the Cannes Market. Globoplay, Grupo Globo’s streaming platform, is in closing negotiations to be govt producers, and to accumulate all Brazilian rights.
The creator was 11 when his father, leftist congressman Rubens Paiva, was dragged off for interrogation by the army, this after he returned from exile. He was by no means seen once more. His spouse campaigned relentlessly to search out his whereabouts, at a really harmful time when Brazilian was managed by army dictatorship. Eunice Paiva was arrested alongside along with her husband and held in a darkish cell for 12 days earlier than taking up her new function, which might turn out to be a race in opposition to Alzheimer’s Illness. Whereas she was nonetheless ready, she received to the underside of her husband’s disappearance and made certain the data of occasions have been recorded to be shared with future generations. It was concluded by the Nationwide Reality Fee that her husband had been tortured to dying for receiving letters from leftist organizations. The tragic historical past of torture in Brazil got here to gentle lately when Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro waxed nostalgic for the times when the army dictatorship was in place, a lot to the outrage of many.
To Salles, who grew up in Brazil and watched the nation change from dictatorship to democracy, telling the story of the saga of the Paiva household was a private mission he has spent 4 years on. It was additionally a narrative he intently noticed as a result of he was mates with the Paiva household.
“Most of my private tasks required very lengthy growth processes, again to Central Station, which was 5 years, and Motorbike Diaries was 4,” Salles stated. “None took as a lot time as this one which I partly was a witness to once I was 13 years outdated,” Salles advised Deadline. “What triggered to it was the emotion I felt once I learn the e book, written by this buddy of mine, Marcel. He was one of many 5 youngsters of the household he described within the autobiographical e book that’s really about this fully regular household composed of father, mom and youngsters from 9 to 16. That they had this wealthy life with mates, levity, humor and a lightweight that made quite a lot of us gravitate round their home. In the future, the sudden occurred when the daddy was taken to the army headquarters for an interrogation. Nobody in that second knew that was the final time they might see him once more. This coincided with a second of this Brazilian totalitarian regime, the place issues began to turn out to be extraordinarily violent, and the place there was censorship and torture.”
Salles stated he prepped I’m Nonetheless Right here in relative secrecy, he knew from second one which he needed Lima for his protagonist.
“Marina is a unprecedented theater actress, and one of the delicate movie actresses of her era in Brazil,” Salles stated. “We’ve talked about collaborating, however I waited to search out the function that would really profit from her extraordinary expertise to present start to this character. I considered her for the reason that very starting, due to her distinctive expertise and the economic system she has in transmitting the emotional core of a personality and a narrative. [Eunice Paiva] needed to construct an inside fortress to outlive, however you might sense the trauma she went by. Marina is the actress to finest painting this function. I most like films the place the arc of the primary character one way or the other displays the arc of the nation itself because it goes by a particular time frame and tries to find out what it needs to be,” he stated. “We had that in Central Station, and we’ve it right here.
“Having recognized Eunice, her husband and her kids, makes this can be a very distinctive venture to me,” Salles stated. “I by no means got here so near my very own life expertise in a film than this. In that sense, it feels a little bit like my Roma, by way of the private nature of Alfonso Cuaron’s movie which I really like a lot.”
Salles is represented by CAA and Hansen, Jacobson.