El dependiente (Spanish for "the shop assistant" but also "the dependent") is a 1969 Argentine drama film directed by Leonardo Favio and starring Graciela Borges, Walter Vidarte, Fernando Iglesias and Nora Cullen.

Set in a small provincial town, the film tells the story of Mr. Fernández, a lonely shop assistant in a hardware store that falls in love with Miss Plasini, a mysterious and isolated woman who lives with her mother.

[1] It is the last installment of an unofficial trilogy of films Favio made in the 1960s, after Crónica de un niño solo (1965) and El romance del Aniceto y la Francisca (1967), which have earned him recognition as one of the most important auteurs of Argentine cinema, despite not being so well known outside the country.

[2] The film was produced by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson through his company Contracuadro,[1] and was shot in the spring of 1968 in the then small town of Derqui, in the Pilar district of the province of Buenos Aires.

"[1] Gente magazine described it as a "rare cinema (...), magical realism of a naive world with a brutally simple anecdote, but with an incredible audacity in the treatment of editing and direction of the actors.