How Brazil’s president lost out to a chipmunk on the silver screen

It seemed a guaranteed box-office smash. With a big budget, a compelling story, massive hype and a central character the nation adored, what could go wrong with Lula: the Son of Brazil?

The feature film focused on the early years of Brazil’s phenomenally popular president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and plastered cinemas and advertising billboards with the tagline: “You know the man, but not his story.”

In keeping with the working-class hero’s roots, distributors offered cheap tickets to trade union members and organised mobile screens for rural areas without cinemas.

Two months after its release, however, the film is struggling and has suffered the indignity of attracting fewer viewers than Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

It is not a flop. In its first five weeks, it earned a respectable $3.7m, representing 818,337 bums on seats. But producers’ hopes of drawing an audience of 5 million – out of a population of almost 200 million – now look forlorn.

It is not Lula’s fault. The president cruises on a tide of feelgood news: poverty falling, economy growing, investment booming. The “country of the future” is finally realising its potential, and on his watch. The producers’ error, it seems, was to equate Lula’s popularity with a yearning to watch fawning, one-sided political propaganda.

The true story is certainly inspiring: a boy overcoming poverty and an abusive, alcoholic father to become a charismatic trade union leader who challenged Brazil’s military dictatorship. But the biopic depicts Lula as an almost angelic figure, incapable of doing wrong. No mention, for example, of him leaving his pregnant partner for another woman, or the labour movement’s political compromises and corruption.

Brazilians are too sophisticated for such a whitewash, said analysts. “It is one thing to approve of his government and quite another to worship a personality,” said Bolivar Lamounier, a risk analyst. It did not help that the film was accused of being indirectly funded by the government and timed to boost the candidacy of Dilma Rousseff, a Lula protegée running to succeed him in October elections. Producers denied both claims and blamed box office returns on the fact that Lula’s greatest fans, the poor, could not afford tickets.