Danny Lyon (b. 1942) is better known as a photographer, an associate of the Magnum Photos cooperative and official cameraman for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement. Last year, expansive solo shows at the De Young Museum and the Whitney finally reinserted his name into the art world, but Lyon has been at work making images continuously since the 1960s, spending 1969 living and working with Robert Frank in New York City. Since then, he has been traveling the world to join and document communities and movements of people from Chinese coal miners to Occupy protestors. Arguably as important, though less widely known, are his sixteen non-fiction films, humble and intensely personal works overswept by a sense of the depth and durability of the human spirit as observed during long moments that accrue and become years, in a practice constituting more than a style, but rather a whole system of ethics, a verité approach not to the cinematic act alone but to human beings themselves and the stories they tell, whether with their words or with the way they stand, the way they look into the camera. Much of the work included in this program is concerned with the status of illegal immigrants and other marginalized peoples, and it is with the consequences of adopting an official policy of hate and insecurity about identity and otherness in mind that the Harvard Film Archive is honored to welcome Danny Lyon in person on two nights to present and discuss this selection of beautiful and urgent cinema. – Will VanKoughnett