Lula biopic to debut at Brasilia film festival

RIO DE JANEIRO - A much-anticipated biopic chronicling the early years of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will premiere next month at the Brasilia film festival, organisers said.

“Lula, o filho do Brasil” (Lula, Son of Brazil) will be the opening film at the festival — which gets underway Nov 17 — but will not be in competition.

The biopic, directed by Fabio Barreto and based on an authorised biography written by Denise Parana, will not be released nationwide until Jan 1, 2010, seven years from the day Lula was inaugurated for his first term.

The movie tells of the president’s childhood in an impoverished small town of northeastern Brazil and his family’s subsequent migration to Sao Paulo state, where his mother — Dona Lindu — struggled to support her eight children by herself after her husband abandoned them.

Moviegoers will follow young Luiz Inacio’s dramatic rise from a lowly lathe operator to a powerful labour leader and his founding in 1980 of the now-governing Workers’ Party, or PT.

Lula, 63, a hero to many Brazilians with an 80 percent approval rating, is portrayed both by child actors and by 31-year-old Rui Ricardo Dias, a previous unknown who plays him as an adult.

The film, with a price tag of some 12 million reais ($6.8 million), will be the most expensive in Brazilian cinema history; producers hope to recoup their investment by bringing the movie to close to 400 theatres, a large number in the South American country.

Special free-of-charge screenings also are planned for poor neighbourhoods in large cities and in villages that have no theatres and where the $10 cost of a movie ticket would be prohibitive.

Lula himself was involved in putting together the film’s soundtrack and selected songs that bring back memories of his youth, including the tune used in 1970 to motivate the Brazilian team that went on to win that year’s World Cup in Mexico, the press reported.

The opposition has criticised the timing of the film, which is due to be released just nine months before the October 2010 presidential election, saying the PT candidate running to succeed him will benefit from a biopic about an already enormously popular figure.

–EFE