RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – A white house in a quiet corner of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has been attracting a stream of visitors in recent weeks.
They are eager to see the family home portrayed in the Academy Awards nominee film “I’m Still Here”, in which a mother of five rebuilds her life while struggling to uncover the truth about her husband’s forced disappearance during Brazil’s military regime in the 1970s.
“We came here to pay homage to the family,” said visitor Daniela Gurgel, as she roamed through the house. “Raising this story at this time is very important.”
The film’s three Oscar nominations – best picture, best international feature, and best lead actress – cast a global spotlight on both the real story of Eunice Paiva and her husband Rubens Paiva, and the authoritarian government that upended their lives. The military ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985.
“Seeing the world watch this story is the recognition of a struggle that my family has been fighting for over 50 years,” said Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the son of Eunice and Rubens and the author of the book on which the movie is based.
This struggle, he added, is one “for respect for human rights and democracy.”
Brazil’s dictatorship ended four decades ago but no one has ever been held accountable for the murder of hundreds of its critics or the torture of what many believe were tens of thousands. Even Rubens Paiva’s disappearance, one of the most emblematic cases of human rights abuse of that time, is still an open case before Brazil’s Supreme Court. His body was never found.
In 2010, the court upheld a 1979 law, passed during the dictatorship, that pardoned the crimes committed by the regime. But prosecutors and others who oppose the ruling still have cases pending before the court, including Paiva’s.
On Friday, the Brazilian government provided families some relief.
Rubens Paiva’s death certificate was amended to register that the cause of his death was “unnatural, violent, caused by the Brazilian State in the context of systematic persecution of the population identified as political dissidents of the dictatorial regime established in 1964”.
Actress Fernanda Torres, who plays Eunice Paiva in the movie, said: “They did everything they could so that there would be no body, so that there would be no memory, so that it would not be spoken of, so that it would remain hidden in a corner.”
But, she added: “This story will not be forgotten.”
More than 400 other death certificates from victims of the military dictatorship all over Brazil will be rectified in an effort led by the Special Commission on Political Deaths and Disappearances under former human rights minister Nilmario Miranda.
“The film came as a gift from heaven for us, because it deals with a political disappearance,” Miranda said. “The families feel that Brazil needs it. This debt to democracy is being redeemed now.”
(Reporting by Lais Morais, Renato Spyrro, Sergio Queiroz and Isabel Teles, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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