El Ayudante (English: The Helper) is a 1971 Argentine drama film directed and written by Mario David on his directorial debut,[1] and starring Pepe Soriano, José Slavin and Enrique Fava.

The screenplay, about a truck driver who befriends a young deaf man, was written by David, based on the book El sordomudo by the author Bernardo Kordon.

A warm friendship develops during the transportation, with the driver finding the young man's gestures of situations amusing, including depictions of the body shapes of women they pass.

The critic for the newspaper La Nación commented: "This calm friendship is described with a cinematographic language of hierarchy, made of silences, nuances and looks.

The critic from the newspaper La Razón wrote: "Kordon's story gains expressive vigor in the images and verisimilitude in its characters and forms a captivating poetic climate and a lucid realistic testimony".