RIO DE JANEIRO — Rio de Janeiro's landing of the 2016 Olympics last week gave Brazilians reason to cheer for Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, their popular president who lobbied heavily on behalf of the city's bid.
Soon, they'll be able to applaud his image on the big screen.
The $10-million film "Lula, Son of Brazil" will be released across the country in January.
According to producers at LC Barreto Productions, the film will dramatize the president's early years, which they describe with Hollywood-worthy hyperbole as "mythic" and "heroic."
"Lula is a Rocky Balboa story," said Bruno Barreto, the Oscar-nominated director ("Four Days in September") who is the son of the studio founder and whose brother is "Lula" director Fabio Barreto. "It always works."
Since Lula took office in 2003, most Brazilians have supported him as he guided the economy through global crisis, extended social benefits to the poor and projected a positive image at home and abroad.
He enjoys an 81% approval rating, which the studio hopes will ensure big earnings at the domestic box office and an international distribution deal.
At the same time, the studio says Lula's lesser-known early years make for more compelling box office than his two presidential terms.
Based on an authorized biography written by Denise Parana, the film opens with Lula as a boy living amid squalor in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, moves through his years as a Sao Paulo metalworker and powerful labor leader and ends in 1980, after he was jailed by the military dictatorship for his organizing activities.
Highlighted are his family's struggle to adjust to the Sao Paulo urban jungle, his rise to the top of the metalworkers union, the loss of a finger in an industrial accident and the 1971 death of his first wife in their son's stillbirth.
"This is a man who spent his youth in misery, drinking water out of a trough with cattle, on some days eating only coffee mixed with flour," said Parana, who shares the screenwriting credit. "It's not just his misery but that of many Brazilians."
The script's treatment of Lula's youth will try to tug at Brazilians' heartstrings, showing him as a street vendor who protected his mother against an abusive husband. So precarious were the early years for Lula and his seven siblings that his mother said it was a miracle none of her children became thieves or prostitutes.
