El Super Reviews

Cuban-born filmmaker Leon Ichaso's feature directing debut (with Orlando Jimenez-Leal) is an unsentimental portrait of life in exile – both physical and self imposed – shot through with surprising humor. Cuban-born Roberto (Raymundo Hidalgo-Gato), has been in New York for ten years but refuses to learn English, which means the best job he can get is as the superintendent of a rundown apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He lives in a basement apartment with his wife, Aurelia (Zully Montero) and their 17-year-old daughter, Aurelita (a very young Elizabeth Pena), and spends his days resenting the tenants who expect him to look after the building and wishing her were back in Cuba driving a bus. Aurelia, on the other hand, is well on her way to assimilating and Aurelita is a thoroughly American teenager who smokes pot with her friends, spends her nights dancing in discos and has no use for her parents' old fashioned ways. The film, adapted from a play by Ivan Acosta, takes place over the course of a bitterly cold February day and begins with the boiler breaking down. The tenants are on the warpath, Roberto's conspiracy-obsessed friend Pancho (Reynaldo Medina) drops by with his wife (Ana Margarita Martinez-Casado) for an unannounced visit, a building inspector comes to investigate complaints from the tenants and a persistent Jehovah's Witness invites himself in and refuses to leave. Ichaso and producer Manuel Arce made EL SUPER on a shoestring – some $20,000 -- and cast from the ranks of underemployed Latin actors in New York and Miami, deferring salaries and shooting guerilla style. Its critical and financial success (relatively speaking) launched the careers of Ichaso and Pena, and it offered what was at the time a rare look at the Latino immigrant experience in America. (In Spanish, with subtitles)