I'm Still Here

Walter Salles' I'm Still Here is a Brazilian movie about political disappearance. In Argentina, these victims were famously called "Desaparecidos." Rubens Paiva was an engineer who was abducted by the military. His wife played both by Fernanda Torres and her 95 year old mother, Fernanda Montenegro, is left to cope. The movie has been nominated for an Academy Award and the virtuoso performances by this mother/daughter team are stirring. But how does a viewer in a society where such things supposedly don’t happen react? With Trump’s immigration policy and his use of ICE and Gitmo, a once inviolable line has been crossed. America is no longer democratic and free. This is a nightmare whose horrifying implications one hesitates to fully accept. The movie’s resonance then comes not only from what happened in a far away country but what is occurring now. Still there is another level in some ways more tragic and irremediable the film strikes--the empty bed. Time is the villain in that tale and there is always someone who is going to be left. How does one go on living when a beloved person becomes a word that is forever lost, a name erased on a page? Is it selfish for inhabitants of modern Western industrialized societies to invoke themselves into the drama? When their loses occur  there is a reason, illness, death and age, all tragedies, but different from execution. And art does justice to those too. You can’t compare or weigh grief except to invoke the imminent dangers and terror present day political prisoners, undocumented immigrants, DACA children and other political prisoners are facing now.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr