In the tone and tenor of a loving note folded over and slipped beneath a door, Dear Mark shows celebrated sculptor and Lyon’s close friend Mark di Suvero, in footage shot in 1965 Stony Point, New York and 1975 Chalon-sur-Saône, France, at work (and play) on his sculptures: climbing on, standing before, swinging from, surveying, assessing, outlining, cutting, welding, hammering... Much of the film plays through a multiple exposure, one view close up on the shirtless, bearded sculptor, the other tracing the beams of his imposing steel combinations, a third expanding to reveal the imposing structures in their full scale. Not entirely playful, the film touches on questions of immigration and national identity (di Suvero himself was born in Shanghai to Italian parents and emigrated to California at the outbreak of World War II) through the soundtrack, which incorporates samples of a crackling Gene-Autry-cowboys-versus-illegal-immigrants radio play.

In the mountains of New Mexico, Lyon befriended Eddie Marquez Rivera, an undocumented Mexican house builder who traveled frequently between Mexico and the United States. Over the course of several border crossings in Rivera’s company, Lyon discovered the subjects of his subsequent work, including the migrant fruit pickers who appear in El Otro Lado. The title refers to a Mexican designation for the US, where Don Bernabe Garay and his sons travel annually with their neighbors from an agrarian “ejido” 1,300 miles south of the border to pick oranges and lemons in the orchards of Arizona. The heart of the film lies, as in all Lyon’s best work, in his camera’s panoramic sensitivity to the beauty of the land and the men working it, the hard, elemental realities of the work itself, and the wider set of historical meanings leavened by the intense specificity of extended, unsubtitled human observation narrated by humor, stories, card-playing and song. Beset by the camera’s insistence on them as men to be seen and celebrated instead of as labor to be exploited, the Garays and their friends vacillate between awkward self-consciousness and disarming self-realization as they alternately trudge or skip, like anyone else, off to work, at times merging with—and then suddenly erupting again from–brilliant periwinkle and salmon skies.