El Super (1979)

El Super (1979) is historic as the first American feature film to focus Cuban exiles. It centres on Roberto (Raimundo Hidalgo-Gato) and Aurelia (Zully Montero), two Cubans who have been living in New York City for ten years. Roberto is the superintendent of the apartment building in which he lives, and constantly put up with complaints from his various tenants. Roberto and Aurelia's daughter is Aurelita (Elizabeth Peña, in her film debut), who is thoroughly Americanized and whom they often have difficulty understanding. Roberto's best friend is Pancho (Reynaldo Medina), who has fantasies about having fought at the Bay of Pigs and is overly paranoid about Communists. Another friend is Cuco, a Puerto Rican who is somewhat fluent in English who is very happy living in the Continental United States, even as Roberto wants to return to Cuba as soon as Fidel Castro is no longer in power.

El Super (1979) was based on a stage play by Iván Acosta. It was directed by Leon Ichaso, who was himself a Cuban exile. It was truly an independent film and produced on a shoestring budget of around $30,000, a small amount for a movie even in the Seventies. With such a small budget, El Super (1979) was shot in actual apartments and on the streets of New York City. It was shot in the winter of 1978, when it ws particularly cold and there was a good deal of snow on the ground. 

What sets El Super (1979) apart even from other independent films of the Seventies is that almost all of the dialogue is in Spanish. Roberto and Aurelia never learned English. When a building inspector visits, Roberto has to call Cuco to act as an interpreter. Of the main characters, only Roberto and Aurelia's daughter Aurelita and Cuco are fluent in English, and Cuco only moderately so. 

El Super (1979) is also set apart from other movies in that it has no real plot. It is instead a slice of life of Cuban exiles living in New York City in the late Seventies. It plays out as a series of vignettes, all of which could have easily been taken from real life. And while Roberto hates living in New York City and longs for the day Castro is out of power so he can return to Cuba, there is as much comedy as there is drama in El Super (1979). And despite the fact that it is focused on Cuban exiles, El Super (1979) is not a particularly political film. Instead, it focuses on the everyday struggles of Roberto and Aurelia.

El Super (1979) has an excellent cast, although with the exception of Elizabeth Peña, I doubt most Americans have heard of them. Raimundo Hidalgo-Gato had considerable experience on stage, and was a member of the Centro Cultural Cubano de Nueva York. Zully Montero had appeared on radio and the theatre as well. Elizabeth Peña came from an acting family and graduated from the High School of Performing Arts in New York City. Like Aurelita, she had no real experience of Cuba. Her parents had migrated to the United States when she was only a year old.

El Super (1979) premiered at the Miami International Film Festival. It was later screened at the Venice Film Festival and the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Filmfestival, where it tied for the Grand Prize with Családi tüzfészek (1979). It received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics.

Although El Super (1979) is identifiably movie from the late Seventies, it is still relevant today. Roberto's dissatisfaction with is life, the generation gap between Roberto and Aurelia and their daughter Aurelita, and the day-to-day problems of hm and his family are still things with which modern day viewers can identify, regardless of their ethnicity or nationality.   In El Super (1979), Cuban exile is not played as high drama, but a fact of life with which to be dealt. As mentioned earlier, El Super (1979) is the first feature film to centre on Cuban exiles. It is also one of the first American films to be shot almost entirely in Spanish. Between its high quality and its subject matter, El Super (1979) would become a cult film and is now regarded as a classic.