"Lula" Is Latest From the Barretos, Brazil's Film Family Paula Barreto (left), with her parents, Luiz Carlos and Lucy Barreto at their Manhattan apartment. SOMETIMES they limit themselves simply to producing movies, though on many other occasions they have also written, directed or actually filmed them. But by any standard the Barretos - Luiz Carlos and Lucy and their children, Bruno, Fábio and Paula - are the first family of cinema in Brazil. Since the founding of the family production company, LCBarreto, 50 years ago, the Barretos have, in one capacity or another, helped make more than 80 films, the latest of which, "Lula, Son of Brazil," opened in the United States this month. Those films - in a variety of styles and genres ranging from romantic comedies like "Bossa Nova" to political dramas like "Memoirs of Prison" - have won prizes at Cannes, been nominated for Academy Awards, jump-started the careers of actors and directors and set box-office records. In the history of Brazilian cinema, "there is before the Barretos and after," said the actress Sonia Braga, who first came to international prominence in the mid-1970s in "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands," directed by Bruno Barreto and produced by his parents. They are people who live, breathe and eat cinema, and the result is that they've built up a patrimony that continues to endure. Born in Brazil's arid northeast, the family patriarch, Luiz Carlos Barreto, now 83, was raised in the coastal city Fortaleza. He has a boyhood memory of watching Orson Welles filming the never-released "Four Men on a Raft" at a beach there and being "fascinated by all that equipment." But when he moved to Rio de Janeiro at the age of 17, it was to play soccer semiprofessionally and work as a journalist. From the late 1940s on he worked for Cruzeiro magazine, similar to Life or Look, first as a reporter and then also as a photographer. He met Lucy, then a music student, while on an assignment, and they married in 1954. Crucially, Mr. Barreto covered movie stories and got to know directors like Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Glauber Rocha and Carlos Diegues, associated with what by the early 1960s was evolving into the Cinema Novo movement. That eventually led to an invitation to write the screenplay of "Assault on the Pay Train," a commercial success in 1962 and one of the first films of the gritty, socially engaged Cinema Novo to win attention and awards at international festivals. "From the beginning the Cinema Novo was a movement that was as much political and ideological as cinematic," Mr. Barreto, his bushy eyebrows rising and falling, said during an interview this month at the family's New York apartment on the Upper West Side. "When "Assault on the Pay Train," which had all those elements, exploded at the box office, that gave us credibility." He was then enlisted as the cinematographer on Mr. Pereira dos Santos's "Barren Lives" and as cinematographer and producer of Mr. Rocha's "Earth Entranced," both of which won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. True to the Cinema Novo's motto that all that is necessary to make a film is "an idea in the head and a camera in the hand," both of those influential works, as well as many others that went on to great success in Brazil and abroad, were edited in the small guest house behind the Barretos" home in Rio. "Luiz Carlos was 10 or 12 years older than most of the rest of us, which meant he was one of the few to have a home and wife, the normal life of a married man," Mr. Diegues recalled. So his house became a home away from home for all of us, a place where we not only worked, but plotted and planned on behalf of Brazilian cinema. Attentively observing all this were the Barretos" children. Bruno, the oldest, born in 1955, has vivid memories of afternoons like one when he was 10 and sitting in the backyard listening to a conversation between the Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini, in Rio for a film festival, and Glauber Rocha and other leading figures of the Cinema Novo. "It was very exciting, like a seminar on film, to hear them discussing Eisenstein's films and all of that," Bruno Barreto said of those days during a telephone interview from Rio. They were always very encouraging to me and gave me tips. Glauber in particular would always stop and explain things to me, like the dialectic of editing, perhaps because that was a way of explaining things to himself. By the mid-1960s Lucy Barreto, now 78, was also getting involved in the production company, which eventually also set up a distribution arm. Directors and actors who have worked with the Barretos describe her as the most pragmatic member of the team, a characterization she embraces. "For me everything is a question of cost and benefit," she said emphatically, shaking her head and her flaming red hair. I'm a details person. If you think a film is going to gross X, then its cost can't exceed Y. This is a risky business, and you can't be guessing. Both Luiz Carlos and Lucy Barreto have also tried their hand at directing, he with a documentary, "This Is Pelé," and she with "Grupo Corpo: A Brazilian Family," about the dance troupe of that name. But both say they prefer producing. "I don't have the temperament to be a director," he said. I don't have that obsession, that neurosis you have to have. I don't want to define the temperament of a director - - " His daughter, Paula, laughingly broke in to say, "so as not to complicate things with your sons." But, Mr. Barreto continued, being a director "creates a deformity in people's souls. You become the inventor of lives, situations. You become an alchemist.