has always had one eye pointed south of the U.S. border.
It began with his phenomenal script for Brian De Palma’s , which transformed the famous Chicago gangster into a hardened Cuban refugee. After that, Stone directed the photojournalist saga , about the deadly civil war that gripped El Salvador in the 1980s. And later on he made a handful of documentaries about Latin American leaders, two of them featuring Fidel Castro and another one including such leftist figureheads as Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales.
Stone’s fascination with the dirty politics and violent class struggles of the southern hemisphere seems to perfectly align with the dramatic twists and nonstop conspiracies present in much of his other fictional work, from to to to . In the director’s world, which he argues is ours as well, leaders are either corruptible or taken down by the corrupt, while democracy’s existence is threatened by a powerful deep state that includes multinationals, spies, far-right zealots and shadowy middlemen. It all sounds like a good airport novel, and yet according to Stone much of it is real.
It comes as no surprise, then, that he’s decided to chronicle the rollercoaster-like rise, fall and resurrection of current Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose rags-to-riches-to-jail-to-freedom story reads like a movie script Stone could have penned himself. And it’s even one that comes with a happy, Hollywood-style ending where truth ultimately triumphs over adversity.
