Word: brazil
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Brazilian officials organizing the film premiere of Lula, Son of Brazil probably weren't thinking of the biopic's subject when they chose the music to be played before the curtain went up. But the subliminal connection with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was hard to ignore: "You're the One That I Want," "I Will Always Love You," the theme to the James Bond and Rocky flicks and then - almost inevitably - just moments before the film began, the uplifting bars of the theme to Superman...
...been that kind of a year for Lula; even in the middle of the worst global economic crisis in 80 years, everything went right for him. His government lowered interest rates to a level not seen in decades, and foreign reserves rose to a record high. Brazil was last into and first out of the recession, and domestic consumption remained high as the gap between rich and poor narrowed at an unprecedented rate. Rio de Janeiro became the first South American city to win the right to host the Olympics. Meanwhile, Lula's opposition flailed aimlessly. His personal popularity regularly...
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...
Because the poor - the main source of Lula's support - usually don't go to the movies in Brazil (more than 90% of the country's municipalities do not even have a cinema), Barreto says the movie company is offering cheap tickets to union members and plans to show the film on mobile screens in rural areas. They are also prescreening the film for some of Lula's critics in the hope they will give it two thumbs up, thereby potentially attracting more middle-class viewers. But just who will pay to see it remains a concern. "The biggest problem...