With a title like I’m Still Here, you might think that Walter Salles is talking about himself. The Brazilian director of Central Station and Che Guevara drama The Motorcycle Diaries hasn’t made a feature film since 2012’s On The Road, his celebrated adaptation of the classic Jack Kerouac Beat Generation novel. And since then? There’s been a documentary series about Brazilian football legend Socrates and a study of Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke, but otherwise he’s been quiet.

Salles blames Brazil’s turbulent political landscape over the past few years, with the rise to power of the nation’s former president, right-wing nationalist Jair Bolsonaro. ‘The country was changing so rapidly,’ says Salles, when we meet in London. ‘I started three or four screenplays. But somehow, when I got to the end of those screenplays, the reality they were depicting somehow didn’t reflect the whole picture anymore. The country, the national identity, was in flux and changing at a velocity I couldn’t fathom.’

Eventually, he settled on a story so personal yet so political that he simply couldn’t put it down. Adapted from 2015 memoir Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here), it concerns the Paiva family, in particular the fearsome matriarch Eunice (played by Fernanda Torres). She goes searching for her husband, the political dissident Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), after he is ‘disappeared’ by the authorities during the 1970s when Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship. Winner of the Best Screenplay award at the Venice Film Festival last year, it’s a poignant, powerful work.

What makes this film so special for Salles is that he was acquainted with the Paivas. ‘Very early on I knew I wanted to tell this story because it somehow was engraved in my memory, because of the personal relationship I had with the family.’ The son of a diplomat, Salles met the Paivas when he was 13, after his family moved back from Paris during another period of great change. ‘I came back to Brazil after five years living abroad. I didn’t recognise my own country. It was so different from the one I had left because it was now under military dictatorship.’

The film also reunited him with two beloved actors: Salles worked with Torres, who plays Eunice, in 1995’s Foreign Land. Torres’ mother Fernanda Montenegro also features as Eunice in her later years; Montenegro famously starred in Salles’ Central Station, playing a woman who writes letters for illiterate customers, a role that led to her becoming the only Brazilian nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. 

‘She truly elevated Central Station,’ insists Salles. ‘Fernanda Montenegro made us be better than we thought we could be, so to have her and her daughter in the same film playing the same character gave the impression that somehow different films I had done in the past were merging into one. And interestingly, it wasn’t a road movie anymore. I’ve done many road movies, and I think that the journey now was within. It was an interior journey. And a journey in time as well. The journey in Motorcycle Diaries covers 12,000 miles, but the journey in I’m Still Here covers 40 years of that family’s life.’

Salles also seems delighted by the casting of Selton Mello as Rubens. ‘That character had to have such a strong presence in those first 30 minutes that somehow when he’s taken away, his absence would have to echo throughout the rest of the film. And I always thought that Selton was one of those charismatic actors. This is a film about family, done by a film family. Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres are at the heart of my film family, and now it’s been enlarged by Selton.’

I’m Still Here is in cinemas from Friday 21 February.