CRITICA

Our Spring 2025 issue theme invites reflecting  “On Freedom.” In this issue, our contributors grappled with the subtleties around what it means to be free or not. Our submissions, like always, took up this issue through varied lenses, exploring inner, collective, social, and political freedom. 

In her president’s report, Geltman reminds us that Freedom is “found in how we stay with each other, even–maybe especially–in uncertainty.” Following her lead, I wonder if freedom is the ability to rely on others when traversing painful experiences. Othering interrupts this process as the pain of the other is denied within a smoke of fear. One’s sense of empathy, connection and compassion is lost when one experiences the world in terms of good and evil, and freedom is compromised. In her essay “Far beyond the family: we are children of a thousand men”, Pires explains that the risk of becoming closed off within the nuclear family at the expense of the collective brings up the risk that the broader community will become neglected, opening up the path to humanity committing its worst crimes. Freedom is then the ability to care for our collective and each other, and to create a supportive network of caring human beings. 

As we grappled with Freedom and its counterparts, I was pulled into thinking about Brazilian Dictatorship in conversation with the movie, “I am Still here.” The first Brazilian movie to win an Oscar, it allows the story of a family deeply impacted by the Brazilian Dictatorship to be told and watched in and outside Brazil. In that, the movie itself emerges as resistance to forgetfulness. Or invitation to remember. 

In a conversation with a family friend, now in her mid 70’s about the movie, she told me how she was shocked because she was not aware that people were being tortured or disappeared at that time. When the Military Coup took place, she was a teenager. Her very controlling military father did not allow politics to be discussed at the dinner table or any time in the household. She sometimes heard stories of people who would get involved with politics, and understood that as a bad thing or the communists emerging as a danger. She had no interest in it, and felt fearful of learning more about it. The movie touched her: how come people were being ‘disappeared’? How come people were being tortured? Poor woman, she had no access to her husband’s bank account. And, even worse, he did not even have a death certificate until 20 years later. 

She lived through the coup and the 20 years of Dictatorship, and felt that time was a time of order. Now, she also realizes it was a time of unawareness, obliviousness, and extreme naivete. Inside her household, unable to form an opinion through an open exploration of facts, she was kept at the border of history in the making, becoming an easily controlled citizen. Dictatorship meant being unable to think and to have the freedom to see through what was happening right in front of her. 

The movie is touching. Fernanda Torres offered us a brilliant performance as Eunice Paiva, Rubem Paiva’s wife, who was imprisoned without charge and interrogated for 12 days. Rubens Paiva, among other politicians, had his congressional mandate revoked a few days after the military took power. Seven years after that, during what became known as the Years of Lead (corresponding to the period of the greatest human rights abuses of the regime), Paiva was arrested and tortured until death. His body was never found, and even after investigations, those accused of torturing him have still not been convicted (three of the four are already deceased). 

The movie focused on his idyllic family life and the immense disruption his arrest created. The dictatorship lies as background shadow, and we watch Eunice Paiva’s resilience and ability to move beyond the horrors of her difficult situation. Without touching directly on the political turmoil, we notice how she is gradually trapped and silenced. She resists though, and we learn that she became a lawyer and dedicated her life to give voice to oppressed minorities. In the film, we learned about how this family stayed together through deeply uncertain times, beyond the losses and silencing that they experienced. Freedom existed as they stayed ‘in community’ throughout oppressive times. The story provides us with a framework of hope. 

We need many others to traverse life, to become human beings, to sustain our precarious human existence. Freedom, in this context, is contact, connection, being-with, learning from, opening oneself to others, our fellow travelers traversing the sea of our complex existence. In our next pages, we find our contributors wrestling with ways to stay connected, thinking, feeling, experiencing freedom and the lack thereof. We hope it brings us into staying together.

References
Salles, W. (2024). I am still here [Film].  VideoFilmes, RT Features, and MACT Productions.