Sitting at a beautiful rooftop overlooking the sprawling streets of Italy’s Taormina, Oscar-nominated Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres still can’t quite believe she has finally made it to Sicily. Torres, who is in town to receive the Taormina Film Festival Achievement Award, tells Variety that visiting the region has been a “longtime dream” of hers. 

“I am so moved because my family descends from Italy,” she goes on, recalling how her mother, iconic Brazilian actor Fernanda Montenegro, won an award in the same town in 1978. “Since then, I have always wanted to visit. I have friends who have attended the theater festival, and it always felt like a dream. I had never been to Sicily, so receiving an homage here felt unthinkable.” 

Almost two years since “I’m Still Here” had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Torres is still reaping the rewards of her leading role in Walter Salles’s Oscar-winning drama, which is also being shown at the festival. “I owe a lot of this recognition to ‘I’m Still Here,’ where I play another woman of Italian descent, Eunice Paiva,” she notes.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about this,” Torres continues. “At a time when immigration is such a present issue in the world, both Eunice and I represent this immigration movement that has so deeply changed Brazil, and we are now both, in a way, being recognized here in Italy. I find this to be so beautiful.” 

Torres says such an extended momentum is “very rare” in the industry. “We work our entire lives to have one film like this one. Walter hadn’t made a film in 10 years, so I am so thrilled he returned to cinema for Eunice, for a film that has given such a powerful projection of this incredible woman’s history. It’s a very special film because it united a divided Brazil over human rights and justice. It is a rare film.” 

Yesterday, Brett Goldstein released a new episode of his podcast “Films to Be Buried With,” featuring his “Office Romance” co-star Jennifer Lopez. In the episode, Lopez cried while talking about watching “I’m Still Here” alongside her family, while in the middle of her split from Ben Affleck. The multihyphenate elected “I’m Still Here” when asked by Goldstein: “What’s the film that changed your perspective on something or made you see the world in a new way?”

Lopez said she came to the film at a time when she was “going through a divorce and thinking a lot about my kids.” Watching the film alongside her family around Christmastime, she added, “healed a part of me that needed to be healed.” 

Variety showed Torres the moving clip of Lopez. While watching it, the actor got visibly emotional. As the video reached the end, Torres took a deep breath and simply said: “Wow. That is so, so moving.” 

“This reaction speaks so deeply to Walter’s work,” she adds. “This is a political film, but it is a film about family. It is an archaic story about a mother, left alone with five children to raise. It is a Greek tragedy that goes beyond any political stance, any ideology. Anyone, regardless of where they come from, can understand the foundational idea of family. It’s a sensitivity characteristic of Walter’s work. It’s a human matter.” 

The actor recalls first seeing the film and being overcome with similar emotion. “It’s hard to explain this aspect of memory. The film so beautifully shows these images you believe to be reality at first and then morph into fragments, shot in Super 8. Cinema has this ability to safeguard, to protect memory.”

“It’s beautiful that a woman like Eunice can represent this to people,” she says of Lopez’s reaction. “It’s a great honor to have played her and see this continuous impact. It’s very emotional to me.”

As for what is next, Torres has two projects lined up: Andrucha Waddington’s “Os Corretores” (“The Brokers” in literal translation), which she also wrote, and Bárbara Paz’s “Cuddle,” where she will co-star alongside Willem Dafoe. 

Speaking about what projects she is attracted to following the “I’m Still Here” boom, Torres says it took her an entire year to recover from the “dizzying” festival run and promotional tour for the film. “‘The Brokers’ was a project that had been sitting in my creative drawer for a little while, and I decided to go for it then. With Bárbara’s film, I am just ecstatic, because I think her documentary about Héctor Babenco (‘Babenco: Tell Me When I Die’) is deeply impressive.”

“[Paz] invited me to tell such an interesting story alongside Willem Dafoe, an artist I have great respect for — and just so happens to live in Italy, so it all feels a bit full circle right now,” she notes. “I feel very happy. I have to confess, it took me a while to come down from the ‘I’m Still Here’ phenomenon, but I feel I’ve done so now.”