When we meet the Paiva family in “I’m Still Here,” now in limited release and a compelling reason to leave your couch for a couple of hours, they’re living in a state of uncertain bliss, in a country that had recently taken a brutal turn into military dictatorship.

It is 1970 in Brazil. The Paivas — mother, father, children, always with friends visiting their beach-adjacent house in Rio de Janeiro — go on about their comfortable, sunny, windblown lives. They’ve drawn up plans for a new home. The eldest child is heading to London. Rubens, the amiable, apparently unconcerned father played by Selton Mello, is an engineer. He was also a leftist congressman who fled the country after the 1964 military coup, rejoining his family when he thought things had quieted down.

They hadn’t. The story of “I’m Still Here,” based on a memoir by Marcelo Paiva, may be instigated by the sudden disappearance of Rubens. But director Walter Salles’ sensitive, beautifully acted docudrama belongs to Eunice, the parent trapped in limbo, not knowing if her husband is alive or dead, determined to maintain a sense of family order and protection in a nation dealing with perceived enemies of the state in brutal, deadly fashion.

Much of “I’m Still Here” plays out in ways that may be new, and fresh, to American audiences accustomed to more overt viciousness and ferocity in the storytelling and imagery. But this is a narrative of waiting, and living while the unknowns are the only things known. The movie belongs to Eunice, portrayed with regal but human-scaled bravery by the superb and Oscar-nominated Fernanda Torres. Salles’ film also received nominations this week for best international film and, importantly, best picture.

Salles is a poet of vehicular movement, which you certainly glean from his adaptations “The Motorcycle Diaries” and “On the Road.” Images of the Paiva kids’ freewheeling day trips are captured through eldest daughter Vera’s Super 8 home movie footage.

The director introduces the real, true threats the family is about to confront in careful increments: a whispered conversation here, a checkpoint with jumpy, armed policemen there. And then Father’s gone. The remaining family is visited and then, for a faintly absurd series of days and days, sharing their home with blandly mysterious agents of the government.

The travails of these people, including a suspenseful interrogation sequence sending Eunice and her adolescent daughter, their heads wrapped in black sackcloth, to the very place Rubens was seen recently. “I’m Still Here” keeps its frame around the family, but the family is a highly social organism, and both parents and children have large, rangy lives. Many of their friends and associates may know something, even if they’re afraid to talk.

This gently teeming atmosphere of everyday tension conveys all we need to enter this time and place, guided by a screenful of first-rate performances.

Torres is one of those screen veterans with a surgically precise relationship to the camera, never pushing, always searching for emotions expressed even as they’re being hidden, or held in check, because someone’s watching. A junta flunky. A nervous child. A friend of the missing father. The big, explosive moments for Eunice, who we follow through several decades (the great Fernanda Montenegro takes over the role late in the film) are few and, as a result, utterly authentic in Torres’ hands. She and Salles have collaborated on a work of high craft and confident pacing, as well as sincere devotion to a family and a subject that brings out the activist spirit in anyone.

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'I’M STILL HERE'

(In Portuguese with English subtitles)

3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for thematic content, some strong language, drug use, smoking and brief nudity)

Running time: 2:16

How to watch: Now in limited theatrical release

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