Slideshow
LEON ICHASO:
POET OF LATIN NEW YORK
Friday, January 5 – Thursday, January 11, 2023
FIVE FILMS BY THE LATE CUBAN EXPAT INDIE DIRECTOR:
EL SUPER, CROSSOVER DREAMS, SUGAR HILL, PIÑERO, EL CANTANTE
“Just as Scorsese and Sidney Lumet have given us a New York of corrupt cops and colorful mafiosi, Leon has given us a New York of heartbreaks and shattered dreams.”
– Jorge Ulla
The son of a renowned Cuban poet, ad man and TV director and a writer of Cuban radio soap operas, the late Leon Ichaso (1948–2023) came to Miami as an exile from the Castro regime at age 14. The family, including sister Mari (who became a writer, media personality, and filmmaker herself), later settled in New York City. Leon joined his father in a pioneering U.S. ad agency aimed at Spanish speakers, as writer, producer and director of TV and radio spots for Fortune 500 companies, including America’s first Spanish-language McDonald’s commercials.
Long wanting to become a film director, Leon, along with friend and co-screenwriter Manuel Arce, and cinematographer and co-director Orlando Jiménez Leal, realized his ambition with the low-budget feature-length comedy-drama EL SUPER (1979), which would be hailed by The Miami Herald as “the ultimate Cuban exile film.” Alongside a successful career directing popular TV shows like Miami Vice, Crime Story, and The Equalizer, Leon went on to capture the vitality of his adopted city – and the excitement of its Latin music explosion – in feature films that helped launch the film acting careers of Rubén Blades, Marc Anthony, Elizabeth Peña, and Benjamin Bratt.
"New York is the kind of place you either get from the get-go or you can't stand it,” Leon once told The New York Times. "I got to appreciate and admire what perhaps some people fear and dislike. But I always felt comfortable in just about every neighborhood.” Those neighborhoods in his films include Washington Heights (EL SUPER), the barrio of East Harlem (CROSSOVER DREAMS, EL CANTANTE), Harlem (SUGAR HILL), and the Lower East Side, aka “Loisaida” (PIÑERO).
Leon Ichaso died this past May at age 74. Benjamin Bratt said of him, “There was a lively curiosity to him, a twinkle in the eye that hinted of mischief and knowing, a survivor’s wink that told you he had been to hell and back and probably enjoyed it. He had a deep passion for poetry and music, and his films — inspired by the work of his heroes, Miles, Monk and Coltrane — were pure jazz, respectful of compositional structure but most alive when he played outside the lines, riffing, daring you to follow along.”
Special thanks to Leon’s sister Mari Rodriguez Ichaso and his friends and colleagues Manuel Arce, David Tedeschi, Rudy Langlais and Benjamin Bratt. With support from The Robert E. Appel Fund for Spanish and Portuguese Language Films.
