The heartbreaking story of Rubens Paiva's disappearance in 1970 at the hands of Brazil's military dictatorship is told with beauty and dignity through the eyes of the woman and children who experienced it.

Walter Salles's deeply moving "I'm Still Here," the Brazilian director's return to his homeland and to the film form that inspired his Oscar-nominated "Central Station," begins where perhaps every film set in Rio de Janeiro should: on the beach. A stray dog disrupts a volleyball game. Girls rub Coca-Cola on their skin as sunscreen. Small children play soccer. Flirty teens gossip about pop stars and boys they like. In the sparkling water, Eunice Paiva (a stunning performance by Salles regular Fernanda Torres) floats on her back, squinting into the sun. There's not a cloud in the sky. But there is a helicopter.

It’s Christmas Day in 1970, and Brazil has been in the grip of a military dictatorship for six years that would last another 15. But on a day like this, among the likes of the Paiva family—Eunice, her engineer husband Rubens (Selton Mello), their five volleyball-playing, Coke-tanning, dog-adopting children, and their live-in housekeeper, Zeze (Pri Helena)—its presence is felt mostly in radio reports of kidnapped diplomats and the occasional army convoy that drives along the road that separates the beach from their large, airy home.

Just as “I’m Still Here” is the story of this family and the devastating, state-sanctioned crime inflicted on them, it is the story of this beautiful house (where Salles herself, who has known the real Paiva family since the 1960s, spent much of her adolescent life). It is a place open to the world, to guests and friends and table football and conversations about politics and music and art, that gradually becomes silent and anxious, emptied of company and eventually of the family itself. One day, after serious men in black leather jackets have taken Rubens “for questioning,” never to return, and after she herself has spent many days in a filthy cell being interrogated about resistance activities she knows nothing about, Eunice asks Zeze to find the key to their previously locked front door, and that simple gesture feels like the end of an era.