Lula: Oliver Stone’s documentary about Brazil’s President avoids the hard questions

At one point in Oliver Stone and Rob Wilson’s engaging if ultimately unsubstantial documentary, Lula (2024), about the life and career of Brazil’s president Ignacio Lula da Silva – or Lula, as he’s commonly known – he confesses that his relationship with former U.S. president George Bush was stronger than with former U.S. president Barack Obama. The insight not only reveals the secret annals of power – in this case, the understanding between Lula and Bush, two political old-timers opposed ideologically – but also fits Stone’s intent to decentralise the telling of world history away from a dominant American perspective. This design becomes even clearer once Lula discusses his cordial relationship with Fidel Castro – about whom Stone made three documentaries, Comandante (2002), Looking for Fidel (2003) and Castro in Winter (2012). 

Stone’s interview with Lula anchors the film, while ample archival footage, commented on by Stone, amplifies its scope. Here Stone briskly covers key facts of Lula’s life: his childhood of rural poverty, as one of seven siblings, his time in steel work, union organising – though elsewhere Lula adds tongue-in-cheek-like, “I never liked politics. I never liked unions” – and his belief that workers needed to be represented in Congress, which led to his founding of the Workers Party (PT), in 1987. Stone further lists Lula’s extensive legacy of wide-ranging social programs, such as Bolsa Familia, established in 2003, which improved the poor’s access to education and lifted millions out of poverty, and environmental policies. 

The diverse archival footage and photographs included in the film, ranging from intimate portraits to images of mass protests, helps narrate the years of the military regime, installed after a coup, in 1964, which, as Stone notes, was supported by U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson. In this part, a black-and-white photograph of young forlorn Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s protégé and successor as president, from 2011 to 2016 (when she was impeached), also reminds viewers of the countless sacrifices made by Brazilian oppositionists, many of them imprisoned, and tortured. 

Lula himself needs no humanising – the fact that he’s known by his first name already conveys just how much everyman-vibes are part of his political persona – but the film’s inclusion of highly private moments, such as when he recalls the death of his wife Marisa Leticia Lula da Silva, in 2017, or the brief, light-hearted appearance during the interview with Stone of Lula’s current wife Rosângela da Silva, help break up an otherwise predictable pattern, in which Stone asks a few, rarely provocative questions, to which Lula responds with a fluidity that, while it confirms his incredible eloquence and boundless charisma (Obama didn’t call him the “most popular politician on earth” for nothing), also suggests that he’s told his story in this exact same way many times over. 

Overall, Stone’s mainly invested in the idea that history is made by a few great men, to the detriment of offering a more incisive view, framing these men as part of a larger social fabric, and particularly, of a political machinery. In this sense, when it’s time to cover Operation Car Wash (2017-2021) – named this way because the money laundering it involved was first discovered at a car wash – Stone’s far more interested in how the operation, overseen primarily by a powerful investigative judge, Sérgio Moro, led to Lula being targeted, and then imprisoned, or in how Moro, through a series of political twists, ended up working in the cabinet of ultra-right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro, than what the Operation reveals not only about the American interest in the case, but also about Brazil’s culture of widespread bribery and corruption on a massive scale.  

Lula ends on a celebratory note, with Lula recalling his sentence being annulled, in 2021, and his freedom. Stone then follows him in his successful presidential runoff against incumbent Bolsonaro. This part finally offers some real-life tension, with Brazilians first glued to their television sets as polling stations start to report results on election night, then cheering in the streets to rousing sambas – with an occasional grumble from disenchanted Bolsonaro supporters. And though Stone doesn’t draw direct parallels between Brazilian Supreme Court’s verdict that declared Bolsonaro unfit to run again after trying to undermine election results, Trump’s reckless attack on the American democracy is an obvious comparison. This is perhaps the reason Stone wants his film to ring out on a single note: a hint of hope.