2025-05-19
33 分钟I was in the house the day my father was arrested.
I came down to find the house all locked up and policemen with weapons.
My family were being held hostage.
I saw the weapons and I asked where my father was.
Me and my siblings knew there was something very, very wrong.
Then they took my mother, Eunice, and my older sister, Eliana.
and locked the rest of us in the house.
I was just 11.
Marcelo vividly remembers the day in 1971 when armed men came and took his father away.
Brazil was under a military dictatorship.
Marcelo's father was an opponent and was killed for it.
His mother survived, but was left to raise five children single-handedly,
at the same time becoming a thorn in the side of the regime by campaigning for justice for her husband and for all Brazilians victimized by the state.
Marcelo's telling of the family story has been made into an Oscar-winning film that has shaken Brazil and rekindled a national debate about the past and the present.
I'm Jo Fidgen and this is Lives Less Ordinary from the BBC World Service.
Marcelo Rubens Paiva is a writer, a famous one, and he's very used to giving interviews.
He even counted us in.
I spoke to him through an interpreter about his mother, Eunice,
and his father, Rubens, whose disappearance was both a family tragedy and international news.
My father was a very joyful and funny person.