Film at 11

Sitting at his new desk in a recently renovated office overlooking Lenox Avenue at 116th Street in west Harlem, filmmaker Albert Maysles offers up a pet peeve. He proposes that "the most advanced kind of cinematography, technically, is to be seen in the television commercial. But what's lacking is what you might more likely find in an amateur's work: the heart-to-heart connection. There's no emotional or human element in a commercial."

Though Maysles himself is no amateur, the pursuit of that elusive "human element" has provided the crux of his career. A founding father of cinema vérité in the U.S., the 80-year-old director was one-half of the team (his brother, David, passed away in 1987) behind such masterpieces of nonfiction filmmaking as Salesman, their deep portrait of door-to-door Bible hucksters, and the Rolling Stones' Altamont concert film, Gimme Shelter. The brothers' cult monument Grey Gardens—an extended visit with two eccentric Bouviers living in the desuetude of a crumbling and cat-filled Long Island mansion—popped back into the greater zeitgeist in 2006 through the theatrical and DVD release of a feature's worth of new footage in The Beales of Grey Gardens, as well providing the unlikely basis for a surprisingly successful and critically acclaimed Broadway musical that's been running since November.

But recently, Maysles has been around a cadre of young filmmakers who didn't know much at all about this formidable vitae. After Albert moved his operations into a renovated Harlem brownstone last year, a close-knit Maysles team, spearheaded by his son Philip, created a program designed to teach documentary filmmaking to disadvantaged youth—Maysles-style. The group partnered with the Incarcerated Mothers Program, part of Edwin Gould Services for Children and Families, an East Harlem–based organization that creates activity programs for children with parents in prison. Launched under the name "On Our Side," a pilot course with half a dozen youngsters aged eight to 12 ran successfully on a shoestring budget this past summer, and the organizations are now gearing up to continue and expand the program early this year.

So far, Maysles likes the results he's seen. "They can really do it," he says. "I'd rather have the amateur—without the technical skill, but with the kind of poetry you're more likely to find in these kids."

On Our Side is only one facet of an innovative congeries of business, philanthropic, and artistic initiatives currently brewing inside the Maysles brownstone on Lenox Avenue. The site includes a floor devoted to for-hire production, editing and storage space for Maysles's own current projects, and facilities for the archiving and distribution of the brothers' back catalog. The commercial Maysles Films company shares the building with the newly minted nonprofit Maysles Institute, which oversees the On Our Side program, as well as an adjacent two-floor storefront that's now being renovated into a 75-seat cinematheque. When finished, the theater will be the only dedicated facility for screening repertory and noncommercial cinema north of Symphony Space on 95th Street. The cinematheque has already brought on a full-time curator, Michael Chaiken; the former programmer of Philadelphia's International House plans a calendar thick on documentary series and community-interest work.

The overarching Maysles project began—as many things do in New York—with a real estate venture. For decades, Maysles and his family lived in a narrow apartment in the Dakota on Central Park West. His wife, a realtor, "had the idea that since our kids were all in their twenties, we really needed much more space," he says. "Living in the Dakota wasn't big enough." Unsurprisingly, given the building's legendary status, the sale of the apartment provided them with a generous influx of capital, enough to buy three buildings in Harlem, all within a few blocks of one another. Maysles says they were lucky enough to purchase the buildings prior to a recent spike of interest in uptown properties, adding, "I understand that the value has doubled since we bought them only half a year ago."

The impetus for On Our Side came from Philip Maysles's experiences working with another nonprofit. "I was at a summer camp called In Arm's Reach," the bearded 27-year-old painter explains, "a really small operation for kids whose parents are incarcerated, but it was small and a bit disorganized. One day we got some video cameras and we all did a short movie together. The rest of the summer we did video diaries, taught them editing. There was this one guy there, Ernie Drucker, who said we should really keep this going." Drucker, now on the board of the Maysles Institute, is a Soros Fellow and epidemiologist as well as an active proponent of drug-law reform.