QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM CANNES

Oliver Stone’s subject choices have always been very controversial,. particularly after he interviewed Vladimir Putin in 2017 for the four-hour television series The Putin Interviews. The American filmmaker and the Russian dictator got on very well, and the degree of intimacy ruffled many feathers in the Western world. Lula is a far less risky film: the three-time Brazilian president is generally a much admired statesmen, and has never flirted with authoritarianism. Obama famously called him “the most popular politician on earth”. Stone’s latest documentary (this time co-directed by Rob Wilson) paints a very positive portrait of the steel worker who became perhaps the most important leader in Brazilian history, while also drawing parallels between his personal history and that of the largest country in Latin America.

Then 75-year-old Stone interviews Lula a few months before the 2022 election, when he narrowly beat incumbent far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. The conversations are interspersed with archive images of Brazilian history, and also interviews with others, including American journalist Glenn Greenwald and Brazilian hacker Walter Delgatti Neto. The story begins with Lula describing his impoverished childhood, how he lost a finger in a steel press, and why he rejected activism and politics in the beginning of his life, until his communist brother convinced him to join the local trade union. The 1960s were tragic for both the man and the nation: Lula lost his first wife and child, while Brazil was robbed of democracy in 1964 (when the military staged a coup and implemented a dictatorship that would last 21 years). It was during this time period that Lula married for the second time, and that his political career took off. He ran four failed presidential bids before finally becoming elected in 2002, and then reelected in 2006. He also managed to elect his successor twice, Brazil’s first president Dilma Rousseff.

Stone counts Brazil’s achievements under the PT (the Workers’ Party that Lula founded): the country became the fifth world economy, tens of millions of people were lifted out of poverty, and many of his social welfare programmes (such as Bolsa Familia) are still advocated by the United Nations. Lula became an extremely popular world leader, and left office with approval ratings nearing 90%. We then watch the near-total demise of Brazilian democracy thanks to the efforts of Judge Sergio Moro, who was at the helm of the Car Wash Operation. This was a lawfare campaign disguised as an “anti-corruption” initiative. It resulted in the baseless impeachment of Dilma, the political imprisonment of Lula and the election of torture-loving and dictatorship-praising Jair Bolsonaro. Lula was released from prison a year later, thanks to the publication of telephone leaks revealing that Judge Moro had framed the ilustrous defendant, in a joint effort by Delgatti and Greenwald.

Very interestingly, the controversial American director reveals the catastrophic consequences of American interventionism and the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America, and how Washington has repeatedly sabotaged left wing leaders in the region (the “Pink Tide”) in the past two decades. Declassified documents revealed that the Lyndon Johnson supported the 1964 coup, and that the US Justice Department collaborated with the Car Wash investigations. Now comes the film most significant revelation, a very inconvenient one for American and European progressives. Lula ascertains with confidence that Democrats are far more destructive for the continent than their Republican counterparts, suggesting that George Bush “understood the continent well”, while Obama was just talk and charisma, and even that Hillary Clinton has a profound dislike of her Southern neighbours.

The movie wraps with the nail-biting vote counting of the October 2022 elections, when Lula dramatically overtook Bolsonaro and won what he calls “the most important elections in the history of the country” by less than 2% of the votes (50.8% for Lula versus 49.2% for his arch-rival Jair Bolsonaro).

Lula is a romanticised documentary, or an activist film. Stone’s sympathy and allegiance clearly lies with his subject. He is a brave and well-intentioned helmer and interviewer, but also a little shallow, not too different from countryman Sean Penn. The questions he asks Lula are very basic and non-confrontational (fortunately he’s not as sycophantic as Penn talking to Zelenskyi in Superpower, directed by Penn and Aaaron Kaufman just last year).

It is very strange that the film entirely neglects what happened after the 2022 elections, particularly the failed January 8th 2023 coup, when fascists stormed into the country’s three powers in the hope to trigger a military intervention. A tropical copy of the Capitol attacks in the US, exactly two yars and two days earlier (on January 6th 2021). Roughly 20 minutes before the end of the film, Stone asks Lula whether he is concerned that Bolsonaro would attempt to stage a coup, should the left wing leader win the impeding presidential elections. He answers: “in politics anything can happen”. It would be natural for the filmmaker to show that his assumption was right. The only explanation I can find is that the filmmakers set on their movie for well over a year before a prestigious festival decided to showcase it.

While educational for those with little knowledge of Brazil’s recent history, and of the dangers of flirting with fascism, Lula lacks the visceral honesty and complicity of Petra Costa’s Oscar-nominated The Edge of Democracy (2019), the masterful editing editing andri the canny austerity of Maria Augusta Ramos’s The Trial (2018), or even the granularity of The Coup d’Etat Factory (directed by myself and my partner-in-crime Valnei Nunes three years ago). Still, a necessary movie that may reach audiences that these three films never did. Stone deserves praise for remaining a resolutely anti-establishment voice inside the world’s most powerful country – even if at times his subject choices are a little unsavoury.

Lula just premiered in a Special Screening as part of the 77th Festival de Cannes.