New Film May Sway Brazil's Vote on President

In the opening scenes of a new Brazilian movie, a 7-year-old boy roams barefoot through the parched, cactus-filled dirt of the northeastern town of Caetés, collecting water from a creek where cows drink while his mother waits in the one-room house he shares with seven brothers and sisters. The boy, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, would become president of Brazil and one of the world's most popular leaders, despite his fourth-grade education and impoverished childhood.

The movie, "Lula, the Son of Brazil," which opened in Brazilian theaters on New Year's Day, traces his inspiring biography from the hardscrabble childhood with a doting mother and a hard-drinking, abusive father, to his heroic rise as a union leader who was briefly imprisoned by the military dictatorship.

"What Lula has offered Brazilians is freedom from an inferiority complex," said Fabio Barreto, the film's director, an avowed supporter of the president who makes no apologies for glossing over any rough spots in his story. "This society has always been treated as inferior and lazy and less than what they are. No one has ever come here to tell us that our people are strong." The story stops before Mr. da Silva's political career takes off. But that has not stopped politicians and other critics from questioning the intentions of the producers, who released the film during a presidential election year.