In several of this year’s Oscar-nominated films, the family plays a structural role in the narrative, whether through its disintegration or precarious persistence. This is true even in works not readily subsumable under the category of family drama. What historical and ideological pressures underlie this renewed centrality of the family, and why does it reassert itself with such insistence in the present moment? Bruna Della Torre takes a closer look.
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It’s hard to ignore that many current films, including “Sinners,” “One Battle After Another,” “Frankenstein,” and “Hamnet,” are widely regarded as politically progressive despite being organized around the family institution. Meanwhile, the family is at the center of the far-right agenda. The most immediate and plausible hypothesis is that the family has once again assumed a privileged place within the horizon of contemporary politics, which may help explain the intensity with which it is currently rearticulated and defended by progressive sectors in its various reconfigured forms. Yet this re-centring is not without ambivalence.
This is also true for the two most significant films from Brazil to receive Oscar nominations in recent years: “I’m Still Here” (2024) by Walter Salles and “The Secret Agent” (2025) by Kleber Mendonça Filho. Their politics take on a specific form within the domestic sphere, emerging through the crises, fractures, and forms of destabilization produced by state repression as it is filtered through familial relations.
Within political catastrophe cinema, it is a longstanding tradition to organize the narrative form around the harmful effects that crisis events have on the family. However, state repression and state violence are particular forms of crisis events. As a historical reality, political regimes do indeed penetrate familial life. This is particularly evident in Latin America, where family-based movements, such as Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, played a fundamental role in contesting the disappearances, assassinations, and forms of state violence perpetrated by authoritarian regimes.
Home invasion
In “I’m Still Here,” the dictatorship erupts into and ultimately dismantles the carefully staged domestic idyll of the Paiva household in the affluent Leblon district of Rio de Janeiro. The movie recounts the real-life trajectory of Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) and her decades-long struggle to uncover the fate of her husband, the former congressman Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), who was abducted and killed by Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1971. Based on the 2015 memoir written by their son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the narrative moves chiefly between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, intertwining the private experience of mourning with the enduring structures of state repression.
The opening scene of the film creates a peaceful atmosphere reminiscent of an advertisement, such as the emotional choreography of a margarine commercial. However, this atmosphere is abruptly disrupted by the intrusion of state repression. Politics is thereby transposed into the register of the domestic, and, with all due regard for the anguish undergone by Eunice Paiva and her family, it is difficult not to register the faintly soap opera inflexion of Walter Salles’s treatment, which risks translating the dictatorship into the terms of a domestic disturbance.
In one revealing scene, Eunice dismisses the live-in domestic worker who occupies a small room in the house and whose labor sustains the household because she can no longer afford to pay her. This makes the axis of identification uncertain. One is left to wonder whether the narrative solicits sympathy for the newly unemployed worker or for the family suddenly deprived of its accustomed comforts.
Humanity in the face of catastrophe
“The Secret Agent,” takes place in Recife in 1977 and tells the story of Marcelo (Wagner Moura), an engineer and university lecturer who is pursued by contract killers after a conflict over an industrial patent. While the narrative follows his escape attempt, the film simultaneously reconstructs his trajectory through a self-reflexive archival framework. Fragments from the dictatorship era, later discovered and organized by a young researcher, mediate the story and expose the unstable conditions through which historical meaning and narrative continuity are produced, or indefinitely deferred.
In “The Secret Agent,” Marcelo, a widower, seeks escape to remain with his son, who, following his death, is raised by his grandfather. As Kleber Mendonça Filho himself remarked in an interview with Democracy Now, the film is also explicitly about love and family.
In both works, humanity appears to persist, even to flourish, in the face of catastrophe, situating them in a threshold zone where the horror they seek to expose is partially attenuated. “Let’s smile!” expresses this tendency. It is Eunice Paiva’s line, delivered when she refuses the sensationalism of grief while posing for a newspaper photograph reporting her husband’s disappearance, and which has since circulated widely as one of the film’s emblematic slogans.
Alibis of terror?
The idea of preserving one’s ability to smile in the face of violence risks aligning with neoliberal idioms of resilience, especially given the film’s lack of sustained engagement with armed struggle. Furthermore, this narrative approach involves a problematic intensification of personalization.
While such a focus on personalization may be constitutive of fictional form, it becomes theoretically and politically fraught when transposed onto the representation of political catastrophe. As Theodor W. Adorno observed in “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” regarding stage adaptations of the “Diary of Anne Frank” (1947), which prompted the remark (by an anonymous woman) that “at least that girl could have been spared,” the singular experience can indeed function as an initial aperture through which historical horror becomes graspable. It brings concreteness to the experience of horror.
Yet the same logic of individuation may just as readily become the alibi of terror. Almost imperceptibly, the object of critique is displaced: violence as such recedes, supplanted by the affective economy organized around the suffering of a particular family. In this shift, the catastrophe in its full historical magnitude is attenuated, as the multitude of prisoners, tortured bodies, the dead, and the disappeared withdraw into the background, eclipsed by the pathos of the singular and familial narrative.
Politics of suspended history
“I’m Still Here” projects the image of a country reconciled with its past, as though the dictatorship could be securely consigned to a completed chapter of history. It is nonetheless true that the film produced a concrete effect, insofar as the murder of Rubens Paiva was officially recognized by Brazil’s state in 2025.
In strictly aesthetic terms, however, “The Secret Agent” proves more formally suggestive. It works through a politics of suspended history: the truth of what occurred remains withheld, mirroring the epistemic opacity experienced by the characters themselves, with the sole exception of the researcher, who uncovers the events but withholds them from both characters and spectators.
Nevertheless, both films may be read as symptomatic of the impasses of memory politics in Brazil, as well as of the contemporary politics of reconciliation associated with the Workers’ Party. They register, within the cultural sphere, what André Singer has termed the project of “weak reformism,” transposed into the domain of representation.
Perhaps this is precisely why the family occupies such a central position within these narratives, allowing the crime itself to appeal to a certain form of popular conservatism and ground political violence in affective structures that elicit identification within the realm of the bourgeois familial imagination.
Uncannily familiar horizon
The fact that such films now occupy a central place at the Oscars suggests that it represents more than just a national development. It represents a broader historical context in which Brazil can be seen less as an exception and more as a prism through which to view the world.
What they ultimately reveal is that fascism, however locally inflected, remains a globally diffused and uncannily familiar horizon, one whose persistence calls for not only recognition but also renewed forms of critique. It is therefore necessary to interrogate the relation between political consciousness and the political unconscious in these works, for they disclose, as Fredric Jameson has shown, not only latent utopian impulses but, above all, determinate ways of relating to history.
When examining films centered on family, one might ask: What about those who exist outside its traditional boundaries? How is violence represented when inflicted upon subjects excluded from the bourgeois order of kinship, sexuality, gender, and race? In other words, how is violence represented when inflicted upon those whose lives cannot be reconciled with the dominant familial imaginary? These individuals were targeted by military dictatorships and continue to be targeted by contemporary right-wing politics.
Note from the editors: Read more on these issues in Bruna Della Torre’s BG article “Military Dictatorship in Brazil, Armed Resistance, and the Political Unconscious.”