| El Super | |
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| Directed by |
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| Written by |
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| Produced by |
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| Music by | Enrique Ubieta |
Release date |
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Running time | 90 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Languages | Spanish English |
El Súper is a 1979 Spanish-language comedy-drama film directed by Leon Ichaso and Orlando Jiménez Leal, based on a stage play by Iván Acosta. The film is a look at life in the U.S. from the perspective of frustrated Cuban exiles.
Roberto and Aurelia are ten-year exiles from Castro's Cuba, now residing in New York City with their 17-year-old daughter Aurelita. Roberto has become the super of the building in which he lives, with the troubles of his tenants and his overall discontentment with his current living situation driving the plot of the film. He and his wife have trouble understanding their daughter, who smokes pot and likes to disco dance; this is further compounded by the problems she gets into during the latter half of the film, including a pregnancy scare with potentially multiple men.
Roberto spends the majority of the film conversing with other exiles, such as Pancho, a fellow Cuban, and Cuco, an exile from Puerto Rico; he also tries to find a way to move to Miami to escape from New York, as he feels that, despite the escape from Cuba, that this was a waste of his past ten years and seeks to live out the remainder of his life in peace. After Roberto makes his wish come true by finding a factory job in the area, he celebrates both his wife's birthday and the family's moving out with a grand party; the ending of the film has Roberto desperately laughing in the dim basement, playing further into the isolation he's felt in the past decade.
