In 1974 Danny Lyon traveled to Colombia and made an unblinking yet lyrical film dedicated to the surging population of homeless children living on the streets, abandoned by family and ignored by Church and State alike. Guided by his deft photographer’s eye, Lyon captures the stark paradoxes of an adult society that sidesteps the forgotten children who embody precisely that poverty and desolation that the adults deny and fear most. Brutally thrust into an uncaring world and prematurely aged into a stunted adulthood, los niños abandonados are refugees of the shattered myth and lie of the State as a nurturing family.

Llanito is the first of Lyon’s trio of films shot in and around Bernalillo, New Mexico, and it is also the screen debut of Willie Jaramillo. The twelve-year-old boy acts as a guiding force for Lyon and his audience, reading out the names on gravestones and relating the stories of the people buried there. He is the focal point of a group of mostly young men with whom Lyon would remain friends and continue to document for the next several decades. The film meanders through the town and among its inhabitants, passing between groups of people at times with the keen instinct of a desert eagle and at others in a drunken stupor, stumbling from one scene into the next with the visceral and irrational inevitability of a gravitational pull.