There are many reasons Walter Salles’s heart-rending drama I’m Still Here should win the Oscar for best picture: its gorgeous Brazilian soundtrack, extraordinary, empathetic performances and poignant camerawork to name a few.

But surely one of the most compelling is the giant party such a victory would produce in the director’s native Brazil where, serendipitously, Oscar night falls slap bang in the middle of the country’s annual carnival.

The South American country has thrown its support behind the film like rarely before, with more than four million people flocking to cinemas to watch it and critics calling it one of Brazil’s best movies in years. Many have emerged shell-shocked and teary-eyed from screenings of Salles’s devastating dictatorship-era tale of a young family ripped apart by the vicious whims of an authoritarian regime.

The film’s three Oscar nominations – for best international feature film, best actress and best picture – have prompted an outpouring of patriotic delight that such a miserable chapter in Brazilian history might be transformed into something altogether more positive. “Such pride!” enthused the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, after the film’s nominations were announced.

As the awards ceremony nears, Brazilian social media is awash with messages of support. Some fans have hung Brazil’s yellow and green flag in their front rooms as if preparing for a World Cup final. Others have produced carnival costumes celebrating Fernanda Torres, the lead actor in Salles’s film, or the golden Oscar statuette. “It’s going to be insane,” Torres recently said of the revelry that will grip Brazil if the country wins its first-ever best picture award.

Those celebrations are far from the only reason I’m Still Here deserves a gong. Even more importantly, the film has struck a chord, in Brazil and around the world, as audiences grapple with a new authoritarian age, spearheaded by self-obsessed strongmen not unlike those who ruled Brazil during the 1964-85 military regime portrayed in I’m Still Here.

The film tells the story of Rubens Paiva, a 41-year-old politician who was snatched from his beachfront family home in the summer of 1971 by agents of the dictatorship. “I’m going to help these men and I’ll be right back,” Paiva, played by celebrated Brazilian actor Selton Mello, tells his daughter as he is led away, never to be seen again. (Authorities would only acknowledge his murder 25 years later).

Powerfully, the tale of Paiva’s abduction and murder is largely told not through grisly scenes of torture-chamber gore, but through the profoundly dignified manner in which his wife, Eunice, played masterfully by Torres, responds to the crime.

As Salles’s delicate drama progresses, we follow Eunice’s lonely battle to shield the couple’s five children from the horror that has befallen them and obtain answers about the fate of the love of her life.

Paiva’s son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva – who helped Salles turn his 2015 bestseller into a film – told me that zooming in on one family’s story was intended to expose the “senseless political persecution” such regimes were capable of inflicting on every one of us. “We always thought this had to be a film about family … a family that wants to be happy but can’t be because of the incongruities of political madness,” he said when we spoke last year.

Salles’s intimate portrait of the emotional consequences of such calculated insanity has chilling echoes in the headlines of today, as Venezuelan men are hauled off to Guantánamo Bay to please Donald Trump’s base, and Vladimir Putin’s troops shatter the lives of countless families in Ukraine.

I’m Still Here is a film for the cruel and unsettling times once again sweeping the globe. If any film deserves the 2025 Oscar, this is it.