Jean Charles, the drama about Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician killed by British police three years ago, will be filmed in London and Paulinia, a city of Sao Paulo State.

With Stephen Frears as executive producer, the co-production between Luke Schiller's UK-based Mango Films and Brazil's TV Zero is expected to start principal photography in London in the middle of August - moving to Paulinia four weeks later.

Despite not being the hometown of de Menezes, Paulinia was chosen as the Brazilian location for its landscape, film infrastructure and subsidies.

Situated at 118 km from Sao Paulo capital, the city has invested around $62m (R$100m) to develop its local film industry. Four film studios were built, along with a film school and a high-tech cinema, with a seating capacity of 1,300 people.

Paulinia has also created a film fund to help finance new projects - as long as the film companies spend 40% of the subsidies in the city.

Budgeted at $5.5m (R$8.8m), Jean Charles received a production grant of $560,900 (R$900,000) from Paulinia, where the Brazilian director Henrique Goldman will recreate the live of Jean Charles de Menezes before he went to London.

He died after being mistaken for a suicide bomber by police in a London tube station in July 2005, two weeks after the 7/7 suicide bombings which killed 52 people.

'The film is about Jean and his cousins from Gonzaga (his city in Minas Gerais State) who lived with him in the UK. There is a huge and complex Brazil in London and that was Jean's world,'' says Goldman, who also lives in the British capital.

Previously he directed the drama Princesa, about a 19-year-old Brazilian transsexual who travels to Milan to work as prostitute and get a sex-change surgery.

Selton Mello, who starred in Arido Movie, Drained and My Name Ain't Johnny, will play the title role.

Also, Mello will be in Paulinia this week to promote his first feature as a director, Feliz Natal. The drama about a man who decides to face his past at Christmas time is competing for the Menina de Ouro award at the first edition of Paulinia Film Festival (running through July 12).

'After Fernando Meirelles' Blindness (Brazil-Canada-Japan) and Walter Carvalho's Budapest (Brazil-Hungary-Portugal), Jean Charles will be the third co-production to come to Paulinia,'' says Tatiana Stefani Quintella, the city's culture secretary. 'We are working very hard to become an international-standard film city.''

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