One of the dark horses of the 2025 awards season, Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here” managed to claim the Oscar for best international film on Sunday night from under the nose of long-standing favourite “Emilia Pérez.”
The acclaimed drama became the first Brazilian feature to claim the honor — although several awards pundits suggested the film, a powerful exploration of love and grief set during Brazil’s military dictatorship of the 1970s, had a decent swing at landing its other nominations of best actress for Fernanda Torres and — even — best picture.
But the one win for “I’m Still Here” was enough to provoke wild celebrations on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, where Torres, already something of a national hero, had been named an unlikely muse of this year’s carnival.
As it turned out, the timing of “I’m Still Here’s” awards ascendancy couldn’t have been better for its run many thousands of miles away in the U.K., where the Oscars ceremony took place place during its second weekend in cinemas.
Released by Altitude on Feb. 21 across 141 sites, the film had already broken British records long before the red carpet was being unrolled in front of the Dolby Theatre.
In its first weekend at the U.K. and Irish box office, it earned just north of $600,000, becoming the biggest foreign language film opening of the year so far and the biggest Latin American opening of all time (overtaking Salles’ own 2004 hit “The Motorcycle Diaries”). The film also quickly sailed past the (very) rough 10% rule concerning U.K./U.S. box offices, which states that films in the U.K. should look to earn about 10% of what they do in the U.S. (where “I’m Still Here” is currently sits just north of $4.6 million).
Into its second weekend and — having expanded to more than 200 sites — “I’m Still Here” has surpassed $1 million in the U.K. and Ireland (overtaking both the overalls for Salles’ “On the Road” and “Central Station”). Now, following on from its Oscar win, there’s hope the film will enjoy a renewed surge.
“For us, it’s been a standout — it’s our highest grossing foreign language film,” notes Mark Jones, Altitude’s head of publicity. “And we’re hoping the Oscar win will broaden it out further — that the film will be able to ride that wave of endorsement and mainstream awareness to even wider audiences.”
Altitude acquired “I’m Still Here” at script stage back in the post-pandemic waters of 2022, a deal that came about through the company’s relationship with Vincent Maraval and Kim Fox through their sales banner The Veterans. While the name of Salles — as one of Latin America’s most significant contemporary filmmakers — obviously carries some gravitas, it by no means guarantees success.
Indeed, his last feature as director was 2012’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” starring Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley and Kristen Stewart. Despite competing for the Palme d’Or in 2012, the film was met with mixed reviews and, off a budget of $25 million, only earned $9.6 million globally ($930,000 from the U.K.).
“I’m Still Here” proved to be different, and the Altitude team knew they were onto something quite special when they saw the finished film for the first time in August 2024 ahead of its world premiere in Venice. But they still weren’t sure how high it would go (and the wheels of its awards season rise were yet to start moving).
“We knew it was great, but we would never have predicted how good the box office would have been from that initial screening,” says Altitude’s director of sales Bryony Forde. “Because it’s not a famous cast here in the U.K. at all and Walter Salles hadn’t had a film for a long time that was just on him. So it was by no means a slam dunk.”
But the response from Venice, where Forde says people were “coming out of the first screening crying,” and later Toronto, where she says there was a “very emotional” Q&A with Salles, Torres and co-star Selton Mello, helped build optimism. Then came the U.K. premiere at the London Film Festival in October.
“I was a bit nervous, because it was at Royal Festival Hall, which seats 2,000,” Forde claims. “But they sold out so quickly. It was like The Beatles had come.”
Forde admits that, while she knew there were many Brazilians living in London, she had no idea of Torres’ star power among them.
“But when she came on stage, it was like, ‘Oh, she’s like Meryl Streep!,” she says. “It was a real homecoming atmosphere — and also a realization that there was a very strong and passionate Brazilian audience in the U.K. and Ireland, and then you add in the subject matter and what it means to a generation of people.”
It was around the time of the London premiere that Altitude were sorting the release plan for “I’m Still Here,” setting a February launch date to bounce off the mid-January releases by Sony Pictures Classics in the U.S. and StudioCanal in France. But it still shifted, pushing back from Feb. 7 to Feb. 21 to move away from fellow foreign-language awards title “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.”
The move actually proved to be beneficial for Altitude, as they were able to benefit from a major “shift” that began to build after the Golden Globes, where “I’m Still Here” didn’t just win best foreign language title but where Torres pulled off a shock victory in the best actress in a drama motion picture category.
“After the Globes, the momentum was just sky high and people really just kind of picked up on it on this side of the pond,” Forde says. “It prompted so many more people be like, ‘Oh, hang on, I need to watch that.”
Buoyed by the Globes, Altitude chose to widen its launch plans for “I’m Still Here” in both the U.K. and Ireland, where Forde says even in late 2024 there had been calls for advanced tickets to go on sale (Dublin’s Light House Cinema reportedly later sold out its week of previews). It also ran its own pre-release awards campaign that saw the film land a BAFTA nomination for film not in the English language (and worked with Sony Pictures Classics to accommodate the U.K.’s sizeable cohort of AMPAS voters).
For a film that is so intrinsically linked to a particular country and its population, especially one so far away geographically, a release such as “I’m Still Here” would often see distributors reach out to the local community to build awareness and support. But by the time the film did launch on Feb. 21, thanks to the Globes and its ongoing awards season noise heading towards the Oscars, Altitude found that practically every Brazilian in the U.K. and Ireland was already very much aware of it existence. Many had already bought tickets.
That said, Jones says they did visit the Brazilian embassy in London, giving them an early glimpse of the film before several of the senior staff members went back home for Christmas, where they saw it again.
But as Jones notes, while such “Brazilian enthusiasm” may have bene at the core of Altitude’s release plans, the campaign throughout awards season helped it successfully expand into “more mainstream audiences.”
The success of “I’m Still Here” in U.K. cinemas comes at a time of uncertainty for indie distribution in local cinemas, especially when it comes to foreign language titles. Last year, Variety reported how “Santosh” — a Cannes premiering Oscar submission — had struggled to find a distributor, with one exec noting that the film highlighted a “crisis in U.K. indie distribution — nobody’s buying and everybody’s terribly cautious.”
“I’m Still Here” may have a position few titles come close to attaining — a critically-acclaimed feature that has been building momentum since last summer and became one of the buzziest films in the awards race (winning one of the most sought-after prizes of all). But Jones says it’s still given him some much-needed optimism.
“Considering the bandwidth, the number of films that go into cinemas and everything else that audiences have at their fingertips, the fact that so many people have come to see this film should be encouraging for the wider industry,” he says.
