Fernanda Torres in I’m Still Here.Sony Pictures Classics/Entertainment/Zuma
Growing up in Brazil around the turn of the millennium, I was too young to have lived through the violent years of the military dictatorship that lasted almost two decades through the mid-1980s. But my parents remember it well. In the 1970s, at the height of the regime, they were both medical students entering a public state university in Rio de Janeiro. My parents recalled seeing older people in the classroom who weren’t actual students, but undercover informants for the government. Some of their classmates were disappeared never to be seen again, while the “lucky” ones returned after days or weeks with accounts of beatings and torture.
The dictatorship wasn’t openly discussed at my mother’s home. And because of…