A few months ago, I had a film experience that actually shaken me. It was in early December, and I was in the middle of my year’s marathon, holding the very reputed awards-seasons that I remembered. One of them was “I’m still here,” The acclaimed true life drama of Walter Sols established in Brazil in 1970, about a family that falls from a rock when the father, Rubens Paava (Selton Mel) interrogates the police by the country’s military dictatorship Is taken for His wife, Younis (Fernanda Torres), has been told that it is a regular inquiry, and he will return within a few hours. But this does not happen. Hours day, then weeks, and then spread in months. He is never heard again.
I am watching movies about political oppression for most of my life, and such landscapes. But at that time, I can say honestly that I have rarely experienced such a bone-3-pilling reaction because what I saw is “I am still here.” The film itself, especially the first hour, is powerful. But it is not what it was; I have seen a lot of powerful political films. What new felt for me – and intensely unworthy – was taking Daman’s saga in this way and wondering if it is now the ability to be in America. I felt like it was a question that I had never had to ask myself before.
It is not that there is no harassment within the United States borders. When you see a film drama about racism, from “Two Kill a Mockingbird” to “Malcolm X” to “Fruitwell Station”, you are looking at the scaling reality of systematic injustice. But I am talking about doing something different: the audience of dictatorship. In 249 years, it has never defined America. And as we all struggle to wrapping our head around the question about what the second Trump word will mean, how far it will go, how far it will be threatened to the rule of law, and how much freedom will be lost – what, what, it The question is what, in,, in, what facts, It can be here – It is now more clear for me than ever that films have been teaching us about all this for decades.
If you want to call a film buff, a cinefile, or whatever you want to call it, you pay attention to every kind of film: old and new, Hollywood and independent, American and international, comedy and romance and western and music And noor, war and action and revenge drama. But political plays that find out the power of fascism occupy a special place. Bernardo Bertoluchi’s films such as “The Confirmist” bare a relationship between personal pathology and political oppression. Glopies like “The Battle of Chile” revealed the hidden hands of controlling governments. And,, of course, there are a thousand plays who told the story of Nazi Germany from inside. All these films have been slices of inauspicious experience. All of them have been warned.
In the 70s, American cinema got very political – but there was so many times about conspiracy and corruption that new Hollywood films, spinning with Watergate and Vietnam, did not tell a story of fascism (as much as some counters said that some counters said It is said that it is said that), not of creeping autocracy, but of an American political establishment that became top-thunder with power. Of course, the other half of that story was that the system was able to correct itself. We did not get rid of corruption. But America, and films pretended one of their deepest periods, showed how flexible our flawed democracy was really.
The end of democracy is what we saw in films established in Europe, or in countries like Argentina (“official story,” I am still here “of the 80s”), or Mao’s China. At some level, I will confess, I always absorb those films as I was seeing what they were “”. People who live in places where totalitarianism can take root. I think one of the biggest films of our time is Philip Kofman’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, as it is a drama of such emotional common people who are caught in a political nightmare. I have always seen that film with a two -edged sensation: that the characters are similar to me … but because they are working with the 1968 Communist Crackdown in Czechoslovakia, they are not like me. Because this is where this happens. There,
When I saw “I’m still here,” I thought: How certain is I still true? How scary it is to think that can be made here for the first time?
