Standing defiantly in front of his mother, the skinny boy orders his drunken father to stop beating her.
“Why?” growls the swaying man.
“Because a man doesn’t hit a woman,” he shouts.
The exchange in a sympathetic new film portraying the life of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva gives a glimpse of the guts and charisma that helped him to the top of Brazil’s most powerful labor union and eventually to the national presidency. Lula — Brazil’s Son, opened in cinemas this week, telling the remarkable story of Brazil’s first working-class president and angering political rivals who say it is a two-hour campaign ad ahead of elections this year.
The movie, which at 12 million reais (about US$7 million) reportedly boasts the biggest budget in Brazilian film history, caps a year in which the 64-year-old former metalworker and union boss cemented his place among the world’s most popular and successful leaders.
Brazil’s economy rebounded strongly from the global financial crisis, helping keep Lula’s approval ratings above the 70 percent level that has become routine since he was elected president in his fourth try in 2002.
The icing on the cake came in October when Lula’s efforts helped Rio de Janeiro win the race to host the 2016 Olympic Games, seen as the latest landmark in Brazil’s rise as a global power after decades of underachievement.
However, the timing of the film ahead of elections in October and its largely gushing portrayal of Lula’s early years have given the movie’s release a distinctly political tinge.
Opposition politicians have slammed it as an election broadcast that aims to boost the chances of Lula’s chosen presidential candidate, chief of staff Dilma Rousseff. Lula cannot run for a third straight term.
The movie’s funding by 18 companies, ranging from construction firms to car makers, some of which have major contracts with the Lula government, has also been seized on by the opposition as evidence of unfair political propaganda.
Ronaldo Caiado, the leader of the opposition Democratas Party in the lower house of Congress, said the firms’ ties to the government meant that public resources were effectively being used to promote Lula’s legacy in an election year.
Leveraging Lula’s huge popularity and recognition into votes for the little-known Rousseff is one of the central strategies of the ruling coalition, which faces a tough fight to retain the presidency against Sao Paulo state Governor Jose Serra, the likely main opposition candidate.
Opposition tempers have been further frayed by deals allowing millions of union members to get cut-price tickets for the film, raising its potential electoral impact.
The movie chronicles Lula’s birth as his mother’s seventh child in the dusty, poor northeastern state of Pernambuco, his father’s alcoholism and violence, his family’s 13-day journey to the industrial southeast, his work as a shoeshine boy and then a lathe operator in Sao Paulo.
The action ends in 1980 with his brief imprisonment by the military dictatorship for leading a metalworkers’ strike and the death of his beloved mother Euridice and also portrays the death of his first wife in childbirth.
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