Leon Ichaso

Leon Ichaso (born August 3, 1948) is a Cuban American writer and film director.

Leon Ichaso was born in Havana August 3, 1948, into a family of well-known writers, journalists and artists. His father, Justo Rodríguez Santos, was one of Cuba's most respected poets and a pioneer in broadcast TV and radio -and his mother Antonia Ichaso had a radio magazine show in the 1940s.

Ichaso left the island for exile in Mexico and the United States, with his mother Antonia Ichaso and sister Mari Rodriguez Ichaso, at age 14. His father stayed behind to continue his unwavering support for the Cuban Revolution. Five years later he joined his family in New York.

Leon Ichaso is known as a director who specializes in gritty urban realism. He first made his mark with the independently made Spanish-language feature, El Super (1979), based on an Off-Broadway play about an immigrant building superintendent trying to make his way in New York City. It took six years for the filmmaker to follow up on this study, but Crossover Dreams (1985), was a fine first shot at a somewhat more mainstream film. The film was a hard-hitting look at different but mixed US Latino communities, life in the barrio and the potent drive of salsa music.

Imported into the Hollywood scene, Ichaso found his talent for telling tough stories of the big city slotted into action series on TV (e.g., Miami Vice, Crime Story, The Equalizer) and TV movies as The Fear Inside, The Take, A Table at Ciro's and A Kiss to Die For. Ichaso later directed Wesley Snipes's Sugar Hill (1994), a character study wedded to a violent crime drama of a New York drug empire.

In the Dominican Republic and Cuba in 1996, Ichaso made Azúcar Amarga (Bitter Sugar), a Spanish language film about a disillusioned Cuban Communist.

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