Deadline Read the script series featuring storylines from awards season’s hottest films continues with I’m still here, central station And Motorcycle logs director Walter Salles‘ personal political drama from Brazil that has just made the rounds Oscar shortlist in the Best International Feature Film category.

Murilo Hauser And Heitor Lorega co-wrote the screenplay based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir of the same name, set during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the early 1970s. The central character is Paiva’s mother Eunice, a mother of five who is forced to reinvent herself and her family after her husband Rubens, a politician and engineer opposed to the regime, became one of the government’s politicians. desaparecidos (the missing), and was tortured and killed.

For Salles, the Portuguese-language film is personal: as a child he knew the Paivas and was friends with their children, with the family house on the beach in Rio, open to all, where he spent many days listening political speeches and music. — an oasis of free thought in a repressive regime. “Their house remains engraved in my memory,” he says.

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The story, he says, has become more urgent because “over the last seven years we have spent creating I’m still here life in Brazil has come dangerously close to that past,” he said, adding: “In 2021, a president awarded medals of honor to the torturers of that era. This film, conceived before the Bolsonaro years, unfortunately appears not only as a film about a bygone past, but also as a film about the dangers of new forms of authoritarianism which threaten Brazil – not to mention the world.”

I’m still here reunites Salles with his Oscar-nominated film Central station And Foreign land star Fernanda Montenegro and her daughter Fernanda Torres, with whom the filmmaker has worked on several occasions. Selton Mello also plays.

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Sony Pictures classicswho published Central station, acquired I’m still here left the Cannes market and presented it as a world premiere at Venicewhere he got a 10 minutes of ovation and won Salles the directing prize and Hauser and Lorega the screenplay prize. It became a ticket office hit in Brazil, grossing $10.7 million domestically through Sunday, making it that country’s biggest title of the year. It is released in American theaters via SPC on January 17 after picking up a pair of Golden Globe nominations (for International Movie and for Torres), and a Critics’ Picks name.

Hauser and Lorega, both in the theater credits, have already written together the film by Karim Aïnouz Mountain Sailor (2021) after Hauser wrote the 2019 Un Certain Regard Grand Prix winner at Cannes The invisible life.

Read their script below.