THE year was 1956 and he was only 8, but for the Cuban-born film director Leon Ichaso the memories are still fresh: a gaggle of men sweating under ruffled white shirts as they beat their drums and danced in a conga line that snaked all the way to the Havana seawall.
That was the first time Mr. Ichaso’s parents — an eccentric and revered poet father and a mother who wrote for radio and television — took him to the city’s annual carnival, a bacchanalian event where good Catholic boys were not often found.
“I didn’t feel that sense of abandon and pure joy again until I came to New York and heard salsa for the first time,” said Mr. Ichaso, now 58, who arrived in New York in 1968, just as Latin musicians were finding their own voices. “Guys like Rubén Blades and Willie Colón reactivated those memories, unleashed them and recharged me.”
It is that euphoric feeling of being liberated by art and raw talent while struggling to remain true to one’s roots that Mr. Ichaso set out to capture in films like the highly acclaimed “Crossover Dreams” and “Piñero,” and “El Cantante,” based on the life of Héctor Lavoe, a popular Puerto Rican salsero who died of AIDS at 46 in 1993.
“El Cantante,” to be released Aug. 3 by Picturehouse, stars Marc Anthony, as Mr. Lavoe, and Jennifer Lopez, as his wife, Puchi, also deceased. Mr. Anthony and Ms. Lopez, who is one of the producers of the film, handpicked Mr. Ichaso to direct.
“In his movies you can almost smell the rooms the actors are in,” Mr. Anthony said. “He knows how to create a period piece; he understands the streets, the humanity of it and the poetry of it all. He captures the essence of our people, our neighborhoods.”
Some filmmakers and critics describe Mr. Ichaso as the poet of Latin New York, the self-appointed chronicler of the moment when Latinos were no longer confined to the kitchens of the city’s best clubs but selling out concerts at Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall.
“Just as Scorsese and Sidney Lumet have given us a New York of corrupt cops and colorful mafiosi, Leon has given us, with his stories of popular singers, a New York of heartbreaks and shattered dreams,” said Jorge Ulla, a filmmaker.
Mr. Ichaso made his first film in 1967 and has worked in television — he directed several “Miami Vice” episodes — as well as in movies regularly for almost three decades. The roster of actors who have worked with him include Wesley Snipes (“Sugar Hill,” 1994) and Peter Coyote (“Execution of Justice,” 1999). Yet he remains a virtual unknown outside his fan base, and some people in the industry, who began to pay attention to his work with the release in 1979 of “El Súper,” which explored the vicissitudes of an immigrant building superintendent in New York and the elusive promise of the American dream.
“There are some directors who make a film, and they are set for life. That’s not my case,” Mr. Ichaso said during a four-hour interview in which he alternated seamlessly between Spanish and English in his Upper East Side apartment, a rent-controlled walk-up with high ceilings and a courtyard view where he has lived for 33 years. “Every time I make a film, I think, ‘This is the one,’ but then nothing happens.
“With ‘El Cantante,’ I’m getting ready for something big to happen, the big breakthrough, but I’m also getting ready for a big disappointment. I don’t think that would be the case, but if it is, I’m not going to start crying. I always have a parachute waiting.”
His parachute this time is a still-in-the-works — as in, he doesn’t have the money yet — film called “Paraiso,” that will tell the story of a Cuban rafter who arrives in Miami in the summer of 1994 to search for his father.
Mr. Ichaso’s own father, Justo Rodríguez Santos, looms large in his life. A black-and-white picture of him stares down from above the living-room fireplace, and a collection of his published poems is prominently displayed on the bookshelves. Father and son shared a warm bond, one that was almost severed by the Cuban revolution.
“My father fell in love with the Cuban revolution,” Mr. Ichaso said. “I fell in love with the ’60s.”
When Mr. Ichaso was 14, he left Cuba with his mother and sister. Before he left, he remembers, his father sat him down and told him: “Look at me. Take a good look at me. This is the last time you’ll see me.”
But it wasn’t. Disillusioned with the Cuban revolution, Mr. Rodríguez joined his family in Miami in 1968. By then Mr. Ichaso had dropped out of college after six months of driving to the campus and staying in his car. In the spirit of the ’60s, he was using drugs and writing poetry, and had already decided that he wanted to make films. The family moved to New York, where Mr. Ichaso learned about filmmaking through his work, shooting commercials for Goya Foods and other clients.
Then in 1972 Mr. Ichaso was fired from an advertising agency. In retaliation, he said, he went back to his office one evening, opened the door with his own key and proceeded to vandalize the agency. He dropped file cabinets out the windows, urinated on the vice president’s desk and ripped the water cooler from the wall.
“I wanted to burn my bridges, to make sure no one would ever hire me again, so that I could make movies, which is what I really wanted to do,” he said.
During the making of “El Súper,” he recalled, he had to light his apartment with matches because he didn’t have money for electricity. In the evenings, after a meal of, mostly, beers, he would pass out, fully clothed, on the sofa.
He remembers how he used to run alongside the buses rumbling up Madison Avenue to hide from the neighborhood butcher, who would come after him in his bloody apron demanding payment for the occasional meat Mr. Ichaso bought on credit, and yell, “I cannot pay for your movie!” Mr. Ichaso chortles now at the memory.
The success of “El Súper” allowed him to concentrate on filmmaking. Still, he leads an austere life. His house in Los Angeles, where he spends about half his time, is rented.
“The only thing I have is exes,” said Mr. Ichaso, who has been married twice and has no children. “The price of integrity is total poverty.”
Alejandro Ríos, a film critic, who organized a retrospective of Mr. Ichaso’s work at Miami Dade College about two years ago, said that Mr. Ichaso’s intensity and unwillingness to compromise his artistic vision seems to be almost a throwback to the times when important artists died penniless and in obscurity.
“At a time when all a singer needs is a song to become a millionaire, Leon is a romantic figure,” he said. “There is this great tension in his work, of themes he has not resolved in his own life. In the end he’s always making his Cuban film, the one he hasn’t been able to make.”
Mr. Ichaso said that Cuba is a theme he is interested in, like many others. More broadly his work is about loss, about exploring the space between cultures and between identities, in which an immigrant, or an exile, can either thrive or succumb to nostalgia.
“It’s always about these people who have nowhere to return to, “ he said, “and about documenting certain moments that otherwise, with time, would fade.”
And there is no moment he likes to document more than the Latin music boom in New York.
“Those men and women brought a piece of the tropics with them,” he said, speaking mostly of Puerto Rican artists but also of the Cuban musicians who settled in New York in the 1960s. “And they didn’t do it for money. They did it because they carried with them the pain of their ambulant island.”
“El Cantante,” he said, is nothing but a tribute to those musicians and a way to connect with the younger generations of Latinos.
“I feel I’m sharing a secret: ‘Here, take it. I’m going to pass this on to you,’ ” he said. “That is a great joy, like taking someone to a favorite restaurant or letting them listen to your favorite song. Most worlds I take people to, they haven’t been there. But once they discover them, they tend to stay.”
Da The New York Times. 29 luglio 2007
