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

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

In their hands was a document they had fought for for years – her father's death certificate, now correctly stating the cause of his death.

It reads: “unnatural, violent death caused by the state of a missing person (…) under the dictatorial regime established in 1964”.

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

In more than two decades, at least 434 people have been killed or disappeared, with thousands more detained and tortured, a national truth commission has found.​​​​

Gildo and Mariluse, Tessa's mother, who was pregnant with her at the time, were arrested on October 22, 1973. in Salvador, Bahia, where they live in fear of persecution.

They were part of a left-wing group that pushed for democracy and sought to overthrow military rule.

The dictatorship targeted opposition politicians, union leaders, students, journalists and almost anyone who dissented.

Mariluce was released after interrogation and torture, but Gildo disappeared.

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

Former prisoners told the truth commission that they saw Gildo in prison, taken to an interrogation room, from where they heard screams that did not wake them up at night.

The commission also found documents indicating his arrest.

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

The government routinely plants false narratives in newspapers read by huge audiences in Brazil and internationally.

Gildo's original death certificate, issued after a 1995 law allows families to request the missing persons document, does not state the cause of his death.

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

Tessa, who never got to meet Gildo, said her father's death was a constant presence in her life.

As she grew up, her mother gradually told her more and more about him until she was old enough to learn the brutal details of his death.​​

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

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

​​”As a child, I thought maybe he didn't die. I had this fantasy that he managed to escape, which I'm not sure my mother even knew about.”​​​​

Now, as an adult, she said she still feels like there's 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 body memory of that fear,” she said.​​​​

“People might find it strange, like something supernatural, but it's not.

“It's trauma. I was born with it.”

Until the age of 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 the father.

This made correcting her father's death certificate an even more important undertaking.

“It's part of my duty,” she said.

​​It is not only for the memory of my father, but also for the sake of all the others who disappeared, were killed or tortured during the dictatorship.

In December, Brazil announced it would correct the certificates of all recognized victims to acknowledge the state's role in their deaths.

Until now, only a few families like Tessa's could work with a special commission, which was disbanded in 2022. by then President Jair Bolsonaro and restored by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2024 to have their certificates amended.

“This is a legal settlement of accounts with the past,” said the president of Brazil's Supreme Court, Luis Roberto Barroso.

In recent weeks, a national conversation has been ignited about this violent history, after a new film by BAFTA-winning director Walter Sales 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 his father, former congressman Rubens Paiva, is tortured and killed.

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

She couldn't access the family's bank accounts without him and had to rebuild her life.

She died in 2018 without knowing exactly what happened to her husband in his final hours and without being able to bury him.

Fernanda Torres, who plays Eunice in the film, won Brazil's first Golden Globe Award for Best Actress last week for her role in the film – and many are hoping to see her on the Academy Awards nominations list later this month.

She told BBC News that she has great admiration for Eunice.

“She is a woman who has never spent a second of her life looking for recognition for herself… She wanted her husband's death to be acknowledged.

“Although the world is changing, this absence has never been healed,” she added.

“How do you tell these families, 'Just forget it.' Sweep your dead under the rug?'

Although I'm Still Here is mostly set during the years of the dictatorship, it resonates deeply with Brazilians today.

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

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

In 2016 a group of protesters stormed the Congress calling for a return to military rule. Three years later, Bolsonaro's education minister ordered a revision of history textbooksdenying the overthrow of the democratic government in 1964. it was a coup.

Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has praised the former dictatorship and held events commemorating the coup during his reign.

More recently, Bolsonaro and some of his closest allies were formally charged with an alleged coup plot after losing the 2022 presidential election.

The former president never publicly conceded defeat and his supporters, who refused to accept the result, stormed Congress, the presidential palace and the Supreme Court on January 8, 2023.

Sales told the BBC that the current political situation in Brazil is part of the reason why now is the right time to make the film.

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

Brazilians close to the story described leaving cinemas in tears after seeing the film.

Marta Costa, whose aunt Helenira was murdered in 1972, said she wanted to escape the screening.

“You imagine your family being hooded and tortured like that,” she told BBC News.

“When Eunice tells her story, she tells mine; when I tell my aunt's story, I tell hers too. You can't separate one from the other,” she said.

Marta is making a documentary about Helenira and her years of resistance, but there is much the family still doesn't know about her disappearance and death. Helenira's body was also never found.

“It is a cursed legacy because we must continue to pass the baton from generation to generation until we can ensure that its memory is preserved, that the story is told as it really happened.”

Now, 52 years after her murder, Helenira's family will receive a certificate that acknowledges the brutal reality of her death.

Its importance, Martha says, is immeasurable.

“The day we get this certificate, it's as if the state realizes its role and apologizes.

“This is the first step for us to be able to start again.”

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

The amnesty law, which remains in place, means that none of the military in power at the time or those accused of torture and murder have been prosecuted. Many have already died.

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

“Brazilian society needs to acknowledge this history so that these deaths were not in vain,” Tessa said.

“If we don't work to clean up this history, to acknowledge our pain,” Martha said, “we will always be at risk of this happening again.”

The wounds from the dictatorship, in Tessa's words, are a national trauma.

But for her, like Marta and Eunice, it's also a deeply personal story.

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

“I'm going to bury my father.”

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