Fernanda Torres in “I’m Still Here” 2024. IMDb photo

Today we are reminded of the story of the days and nights when, in the Plaza de Mayo in the early 1970s in Argentina, women of all ages, mothers and grandmothers, gathered to bring world-wide attention to the 30,000 children, grandchildren and others who were kidnapped under the whip of then-President Isabel Peron, the widow of former President Juan Peron.

It was called the “Dirty War,” when Peron’s military dictatorship brought the misled and fated population of Argentina to their knees.

Some 30,000 citizens (whom Peron called “terrorists”) were kidnapped, tortured and murdered. They came to be known the “desaparecidos.”

In director Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here,” from the book by Marcello Rubens Paiva, none of that plays out, but it still hangs like a cobweb in the shadows of one family of that time, headed by a middle-aged wife and mother named Eunice Paiva (a strong and gifted Fernanda Torres).

Eunice, at the opening of the film, is shown as she floats in the calm water of a bay looking up at a helicopter floating away like a hawk overhead. Yes, an omen. There will be more.

Salles’ film is about the start and the following 20 years of Eunice’s search for her husband Rubens (a calm and strong Selton Mello) who served as a congressman for years, but retired in the coming heat of the Perons. Now, as she hunts the offices of the Peronista dictatorship, she stands alone in the empty kitchen and bedrooms of her five children, like a mother hawk. Her persistent hunt brings her to the attention of the government, which keeps insisting he was never arrested. Ruben becomes one of the invisible “desaparecidos” who “never existed.”

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Eunice’s persistence becomes a stone in their boots, so they lock her up for a time in a dark cell without charges. It is meant as a lesson. Then she is suddenly released to a frightening sunny street that leads to two decades of a darkness of their own. We wait with Eunice and her growing family through those 20 years of twilight for Ruben’s fate.

Today, as this story and the decades of darkness flow through our own uncertain lives, we watch, with uncertainty, as the soft beautiful gifts of Torres bring a bit of solace to our uncertain lives. Torres steps into Eunice’s world and her family as gracefully and easily as if they are her own. Such are the gifts of a real artist.

In Eunice, she gives us a real mother with a family. We are reminded that supper and beds must be made, that night and dawn will come again, and within those hours there will be no wind strong enough to blow her house, her life, or those of her family or our own down.

Torres recently won the  Best Female Actor — Motion Picture — Drama award for this performance, the same award her mother, famed Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro, was nominated for in 1999 for Salles’ “Central Station.”

Adrian Teijido’s camera captures the story like a member of the the family. Warren Ellis’ music slides by, as it should, quietly.

“I’m Still Here” is about courage. Remember courage?

“I’m Still Here” opens Friday, Feb. 21, at the Maine Film Center in downtown Waterville. It has been nominated for three Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best International Feature, and Best Actress for Torres.

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.

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