# Brazil celebrates its first Oscar as I’m Still Here wins best international film

Event date: 2025-03-02

Brazil won its first Oscar when Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here took Best International Feature Film, and the award triggered celebrations from the Rio Carnival to other cities across the country.

France 24 reported that Rio de Janeiro’s Sambadrome erupted in noisy celebration as the news broke in the middle of samba parades. The timing turned the win into a national event that collided with one of Brazil’s biggest cultural moments, amplifying the reaction well beyond a normal awards-night result.

The source said the crowd response was immediate and exuberant. Announcers told people that “the Oscar is ours,” and some 70,000 spectators inside the Sambadrome reacted with screaming, hugs and sparklers after the award was announced in Los Angeles. For a country that had never won the category before, the result carried obvious symbolic weight.

I’m Still Here is rooted in a difficult part of Brazil’s history. France 24 said the film tells the story of former congressman Rubens Paiva’s disappearance in 1971 and the struggle of his widow Eunice during the military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985. That background helped explain why the movie resonated beyond the festival circuit.

The film also received broader Academy recognition. France 24 reported that it was nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress for Fernanda Torres, whose work had already won a Golden Globe. Those nominations show that the film’s reach extended beyond its historic category win, even though only the international prize turned into a victory.

The celebrations were not limited to Rio. France 24 said similar scenes played out in Recife, Belo Horizonte and São Paulo, where people celebrated the win with the same kind of energy usually reserved for football or Carnival. The article described how posters and carnival displays featured support for Torres, and how street vendors were even selling plastic golden statuettes.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva also weighed in, calling it a day for national pride in Brazilian cinema, artists and democracy. That political note mattered because the film itself deals with a dictatorship-era disappearance, so the Oscar was read by many not only as an artistic win but also as a cultural affirmation.

The occasion overlapped with the first day of Rio’s carnival parades, which only added to the scale of the moment. France 24 noted that the event had already been expected to draw around 70,000 attendees in the Sambadrome and millions more on television, so the Oscar win landed in front of a huge live audience.

The result gave Brazil a first in a category that had long remained elusive. For a country with a large film culture and a powerful relationship to public celebration, the win at the Academy Awards became a moment of collective national release as much as a movie industry milestone.