During Lula’s presidential campaign 2002, the great documentary filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho encountered the stories and memories of the metal workers who had been comrades or supporters of the worker-turned-candidate. In the mid-1970s, Lula took over leadership of the Steel Workers’ Union and gradually became an influential politician, haranguing the crowds during the extensive strikes that shook the country in 1985. Coutinho films large numbers of workers and ex-colleagues to build a perceptive account of the path taken by this strikingly popular and political figure on his way to the presidency of the Republic – in the same brushstroke, he depicts both a society profoundly marked by industrialisation and a very recent past.
M.M.
