When depth is absent, desire does not jump on board. Instead, it turns into foam. And here they go: the filmmakers, journalists, historians bestialised in the face of the triumph of the statuette. On stage, the shine gleams like an idol of clay. In the audience, eyes reflect a colonised adoration, overindulged. The Oscars aren’t just an award ceremony. They are also a spectacle of bestialisation.

It is fascinating, superb, and embarrassing to observe the collective delirium, and the dominant subjectivity shaping a way of seeing, feeling, and saying this or that. This is achieved through the same type of tawdry nationalism, being criticised. The same coin, two sides of a single side, as the supreme symbol of contemporary numismatics rises, adoration of old things with a new face. The Western colonising validation of thoughts at the height of its brutalism, as if cinema only existed after crossing the red carpet, pretending itself to be made from a pool of blood.

The subalterns still silent. The many narratives are erased. The stories only matter when they approved by a committee of elders. And while the world applauds what it ignores – for instance, the fact that in its etymology, the military origin of the word “trophy” (Greek “tropaion” refers to hanging the armour of the enemy) – there are silences that scream like a strangled bard. Underground murmurs, revolts muffled by the weight of calendars, rich festivals, and the starved ones of emptied treasures. Should cinema really surrender to this in order to be legitimised with power? In the alleys, in the suburbs, in the crevices of existence, in wrinkles and narrow streets pulses an unsung cinema, of invention, that they do not even dare to name; the cinema of the invisible, the unspoken, and the erased.

But what is celebrated in the festival of images? They are not just films; they are tamed narratives, pasteurised emotions. This isn’t just art. This is diplomacy disguised as spectacle. The real problems of cinema become state matters. The thought of depth of field, of the unmeasured in the work, of aesthetics, turns to mud in the swamp of dominant subjectivity. Politics dances masked on the screen, while the subalterns – this time, recalling Indian scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – silenced by the excess of power that doesn’t fit in the frames of the Academy.

Instead of an unbridled search for understanding how power develops and begins to lead life, there is a mad rush for “tropaion”, a sign of change, revolution, transformation. The Latin term “tropaneum” is also forgotten, referring to weapons, banners, and body parts from the battlefield.

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A film gilded in gold

Faced with this infernal battle scene, with a bourgeois and surreal face, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel, or a scene from Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (1974), emerges Walter Salles’s acclaimed I’m Still Here (2024). This is a movie crafted by an elite aesthete (Salles has the net worth of more than £3 billion, and is often listed amongst the richest filmmakers in the world), woven with the golden threads of the heirs of the capital’s colonisers. It says very little about how power comes to secure, to sustain, and to multiply life

Walter Salles constructs a narrative where absence becomes the central theme. The film takes place during the Brazilian military dictatorship, but the violence is not shown explicitly. The plot revolves around the experience of Eunice Paiva, the wife of Rubens Paiva, a left-wing politician kidnapped by the dictatorship. She deals with the silence and emptiness left by the loss of her husband, but without resolution. Initially, Eunice’s mourning is not a search for justice or answers. Instead it is an adaptation to the impossible. The film does not offer a detailed account of physical torture or direct oppression, but explores the psychological impact of disappearance. The absence of the body and the lack of answers become the greatest horrors.

The story unfolds with a focus on the middle class, in a context of privilege that does not shield from pain or trauma. Eunice does not actively participate in the resistance, but observes reality from a distant place. She remains waiting, not knowing what happened, while life around her continues. The city follows its rhythm, and Eunice’s suffering is isolated, without resolution or a clear way out.

The narrative involving an upper-middle-class event in silent mourning, where the military dictatorship appears as an almost elegant shadow to give voice to the erased of history, though necessary (everything that exists is necessary!), does not reflect the pulse of the streets, or even its absence. Eunice Paiva, tenderly and drowsily portrayed by Fernanda Torres, seems to be the story of a spectator of her own martyrdom. There is no scream, nor acceptance, no revolt, no revolution, just the painful repetition of a Pandora’s box erasing Ariadne’s thread.

The film does not speak of tortured bodies, but of the remnants of disappearance. It does not recount the bodies torn from their places. Instead it focuses on erased memories of a class. A pain that echoes in the silence of empty chairs, in the absence of names, in the dust that covers unseen portraits.

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Voices of the middle class

Cinematic portrayals of dictatorship often reflect a middle-class perspective. But should they? Brazilian history’s official narrative has been largely shaped by those who waited safely behind closed doors, while violence played out on the alleyways and favelas. The trauma recounted is selective, and the stories of the silenced – the oppressed, the missing, the marginalised – are left out. Cinema, especially in its more polished forms, tends to amplify voices already heard, while the cries from the streets remain echoes unheard on the red carpets of international festivals.

The erasure of these voices isn’t just a cinematic choice. It’s also a historical denial. By focusing on middle-class narratives, cinema risks reducing dictatorship to a story of inconvenience rather than one of systemic oppression and violence. This approach sanitises horror, transforming pain into consumable drama, leaving social inequalities unexamined and reducing complex realities to simplistic tales palatable for privileged audiences. The stories of the oppressed become footnotes, their struggles rendered invisible by narrative choices that prioritise comfort over confrontation.

This critique isn’t merely about representation. It’s about power. Contemporary cinema navigates a battlefield of visibility and silence. The dictatorship, in this context, becomes an aesthetic motif rather than a historical wound. When films like I’m Still Here choose to focus on the pain of waiting, the silence of the middle class, they risk ignoring the screams that were never heard in the first place. This choice raises an ethical dilemma: can cinema about dictatorship be truly honest if it ignores those who bore the brunt of its violence?

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I’m no longer here

Walter Salles, known for his delicate storytelling, crafts I’m still here with a focus on absence. The film follows Eunice Paiva (played with haunting subtlety by Fernanda Torres), the wife of Rubens Paiva, a politician abducted by the dictatorship. Her grief is not revolutionary but rooted in the impossibility of mourning without a body to bury. Salles avoids explicit violence, choosing instead to portray terror through silence and absence. Yet, this aesthetic choice risks alienating those whose pain was loud and visible, whose lives were shattered in public, not behind the closed doors of middle-class homes.

The film portrays dictatorship as a personal loss, a void that swallows memory. But whose memory? Eunice’s story, while powerful, represents a specific narrative – one of privilege and safety, even in suffering. The true horror of dictatorship, experienced by those who were tortured, displaced, and killed, is absent. The focus on biopolitics and the disappearance of bodies is compelling but remains within the realm of intellectual contemplation rather than visceral truth. This approach sanitises violence, rendering it poetic and palatable.

The film’s aesthetic is undoubtedly refined, but its elegance risks turning dictatorship into a metaphor rather than confronting its material consequences. The omission of systemic violence reflects a broader issue within Brazilian cinema: the tendency to aestheticise historical trauma rather than engage with its political implications. This choice has political consequences. By framing the dictatorship through the eyes of those who could afford to wait in silence, the film reinforces a narrative of passivity, avoiding the complexities of resistance and complicity.

The narrative is built on ellipses, avoiding the brutality that marked Brazil’s military regime. The non-representation of explicit violence is meant to evoke terror, but it also risks distancing viewers from the harsh realities faced by the marginalised. Where are the stories of the favelas, the urban peripheries where state violence was overt and unrelenting? Where are the narratives of resistance, the cries of mothers searching for their sons, the political prisoners who never returned? The film does not even allude to those. I’m Still Here thus becomes an artifact of cultural privilege, reflecting the anxieties of those who watched history unfold from a distance.

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Films still not here

The dilemma extends beyond this film. It questions the role of cinema in historical memory. Can, and should filmmakers break free from the confines of privilege in order to explore the dictatorship’s impact on the marginalised? Can/should cinema become a site of resistance rather than a monument to nostalgia? It must abandon the safety of metaphor and confront the rawness of history in order to do so. It must amplify silenced voices, bringing the streets, the favelas, and the prisons into the narrative.

This is not merely a call for representation but for a reimagining of cinematic form. The challenge is to create films that do not merely reflect society but actively question its structures. This requires breaking away from conventional narratives, embracing fragmentation, dissonance, and contradiction. It means rejecting the polished aesthetics that turn pain into spectacle, opting instead for a rawness that echoes the unfinished histories still haunting the present.

Walter Salles crafts a beautiful film, but beauty alone cannot carry the weight of historical memory. The dictatorship’s legacy cannot be confined to middle-class trauma. It is written in the silenced cries of the oppressed, in the struggles that continue in the shadows. Cinema must go beyond the comfort of the familiar and into the uncomfortable truths buried in the margins of history in order to honour these stories.

In the end, I’m Still Here is a film about waiting, about the impossibility of closure. But whose closure? The narrative remains tied to the middle-class experience, leaving the struggles of the marginalised in the shadows. As long as these voices remain unheard, as long as the narratives of the oppressed are relegated to the periphery, the story of dictatorship will remain incomplete.

Cinema must do more than remember. Cinema must resist. It must challenge historical silences, shatter comfortable narratives, and amplify the whispers of those who never allowed to scream. Only then can it transform memory into resistance, history into insurrection. Only then can cinema fulfill its revolutionary potential.

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History repeating

Brazilian historian José Murilo de Carvalho reflected on how the Brazilian people perceived the Republic, especially in its early years. One of the aspects he highlighted was the idea that the Republic was seen by many as something distant from the popular reality, as a “bestialism” that did not meet the needs and desires of the people. The republican power, distant from the everyday practices of the people, was seen as an imposition by elites who knew little about the real issues afflicting the masses. His 1987 book The Bestialised is a reflection on alienation, misunderstanding, and the exclusion of the people from the republican political processes, and how this generated a detachment and even a certain disdain for this new form of government.

It’s always like this, 1,001 times and over again. This is not a metaphor, especially when considering the open wounds of Latin America and memories of underdevelopment. Because, as long as the severed heads of history continue to refuse the political reading of truly minority cinema, of the misfits, the unchained, the abnormal, and only gladly accept, in geopolitical charity, the banquet of the elites, we will live the eternal farce and tragedy of historical repetition, like infinite Pantagruel and Gargantua.

Let the force of other existences rise from the back of the idiotised, biopolitical cinema practices. Let them incorporate the multiplicity of memories, because what’s missing is a people that exists in memory and flesh, so that time doesn’t erase them twice. Am I still here? Perhaps. Our steps are being erased in the soft sands of time. I want an empty throne!