Word: films
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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None of this, however, is in Lula, Son of Brazil, the two-hour epic that opens across Latin America's biggest nation on Jan. 1. With a secondary billing that goes "You know the man, but you don't know his story," the film vaults through the episodes that marked Lula's early years and his remarkable rise from poor to powerful. Starting in the scrubland of the northeast, where he was born one of eight kids, it follows him to São Paulo, where he suffered at the hands of an abusive and alcoholic father. It shows...
...style that owes much to Brazil's famous soap operas, in which every movement, emotion and line drips with melodrama, the film depicts him losing a finger in a lathe accident and then his wife and son in childbirth, before he bounces back to lead the powerful metalworkers' union in historic strikes that challenged the country's military dictatorship. (Read "Can Rio's Crime Problem Be Solved Before the Olympics...
Little-known actor Rui Ricardo Dias does a fine job portraying Lula from young man to adult, but the film glosses over Lula's frailties, depicting him as a man who can do no wrong. "The director omitted episodes in Lula's life that suggest the President has weaknesses or defects," said Veja, a popular right-wing newsmagazine. "Basically, it's a terrible film," wrote critic Ricardo Calil...
Producer Paula Barreto acknowledges the film rounds out some of Lula's rough edges but says such is the concessionary nature of making biopics. "It's a film, and cinema is about choices. You have to leave things out," Barreto tells TIME. "What was important was that I wanted to portray that conciliatory side of him - the man who brought people together, who always wanted to talk and negotiate and was never radical...
...problem is that portraying Lula as a saint stretches credulity. Brazilians know and admire the man who dragged himself up from poverty to become President of the world's fifth most populous nation. But while the film ends in 1980, the years since have produced a different Lula, the intemperate leader who swears in public and rails at the press for investigating graft, and whose government was tainted by one of the most egregious corruption schemes in Brazilian history...