Synopsis: EL CANTANTE legendary Puerto Rican salsa singer Hector Lavoe, a pioneer of the sound and sensibility that redefined Latin music in the 1960s and 1970s. Directed by Leon Ichaso, the film is a labor of love for its stars, Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez, who are both New Yorkers of Puerto Rican... EL CANTANTE legendary Puerto Rican salsa singer Hector Lavoe, a pioneer of the sound and sensibility that redefined Latin music in the 1960s and 1970s. Directed by Leon Ichaso, the film is a labor of love for its stars, Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez, who are both New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent. Shepherded to the screen and produced by Lopez, EL CANTANTE portrays an era when a new sense of national identity and pride took root in Puerto Rican communities across the U.S. Hector Lavoe’s music was both a soundtrack to and affirmation of that awakening, and that music courses joyfully through EL CANTANTE. Spanning the 1960s to the 1980s, EL CANTANTE charts Hector Lavoe’s rapid rise to success and fame as an artist whose music combined Puerto Rican tradition with streetwise modernity and unabashed emotion with straightforward realism. It reveals the singer not only as an architect of Salsa but as its soul; the kind of artist, like Billie Holliday, Edith Piaf or La Lupe, who forges an uncanny emotional bond with his audience. Love, pain, joy, pride, sorrow, endurance: Lavoe’s singing contained the raw stuff of life as ordinary people -- and he himself -- knew it. As Lavoe, Anthony mines the contradictory essence of a gifted man who could express anything with his music, but channeled his inner turmoil into a host of self-destructive behaviors. Anthony’s intensity and honesty is matched by that of Lopez, who portrays Lavoe’s wife, Puchi. In their first onscreen pairing, the real-life couple capture the complex dynamics of a relationship between two bright, funny and flawed human beings who loved, battled and forgave one another for twenty years, until Lavoe’s death in 1993. [More]