Fábio Barreto

Fábio Barreto was a Brazilian film director, producer, screenwriter and actor from a prominent filmmaking family that also includes his brother, director Bruno Barreto. He directed O Quatrilho (1995), a period drama set among Italian immigrant families in southern Brazil, which became the first Brazilian film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in more than thirty years. Barreto later directed Lula, o Filho do Brasil (2009), a biographical film about the early life of Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, which was the most expensive production in the history of Brazilian cinema at the time of its release. Across a career running from 1977 to 2009 he directed nine feature films. Barreto was seriously injured in a car accident in 2015 that left him with permanent brain damage, and he died in 2019.