Nearly two years after I’m Still Here premiered at the Venice Film Festival, Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres arrived in Sicily this week to receive the Taormina Film Festival Achievement Award — and found herself moved to tears by an unexpected testimonial from Jennifer Lopez.
Torres, whose Italian family roots made the trip to Taormina personally resonant, noted that her mother, iconic Brazilian actor Fernanda Montenegro, had received an award at the same festival in 1978. The two women share more than family ties: both have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in films directed by Walter Salles — Montenegro for Central Station in 1999, and Torres for I’m Still Here in 2025 — making them the only two Brazilian actresses ever to receive that nomination.
During the interview, Torres was shown a clip from a recent podcast episode in which Lopez described watching I’m Still Here with her family while going through her divorce from Ben Affleck. Lopez told the podcast host she came to the film at a time when she was “going through a divorce and thinking a lot about my kids,” and that watching it over the holidays had “healed a part of me that needed to be healed.” Torres watched the clip in silence, then exhaled. “Wow. That is so, so moving,” she said.
The reaction prompted Torres to reflect on why Salles’s film has connected so far beyond its political subject matter. “This is a political film, but it is a film about family. It is an archaic story about a mother, left alone with five children to raise. It is a Greek tragedy that goes beyond any political stance, any ideology,” she said. “Anyone, regardless of where they come from, can understand the foundational idea of family.”
I’m Still Here, based on the true story of Eunice Paiva — whose husband was disappeared by Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s — won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film and Torres pulled off a major upset at the Golden Globes, beating out Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Kate Winslet, Tilda Swinton, and Pamela Anderson. The film cost $1.5 million to make and grossed $25 million worldwide.
Torres said it took her a full year to recover from the film’s demanding awards circuit before returning to work. She has two projects ahead: Os Corretores, a feature she wrote herself, to be directed by her husband Andrucha Waddington, and Cuddle, a dystopian drama alongside Willem Dafoe, directed by Bárbara Paz and set in a near-future city where intimacy is bought and sold.
