The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to present this tribute to local filmmaker Jan Egleson, recipient of this year’s Vision Award for Distinguished Filmmaking from the Boston Film/Video Foundation. Born in New York City in 1946, Egleson began his professional life as an actor, appearing with Al Pacino in the Theater Company of Boston’s productions of Richard III and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and in several television and feature film productions, including The Friends of Eddie Coyle. It was this experience that gave him the inspiration to make films of his own. Based on relationships he had developed with working-class Cambridge youth, Egleson made an innovative trilogy of locally produced films in the late seventies and early eighties. Since that time, he has divided his directing efforts between television films and theatrical features, including the screen adaptation of Lanford Wilson’s Lemon Sky, starring Kevin Bacon (Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival), and A Shock to the System, starring Michael Caine and Liz McGovern. He is just completing a new feature, again shot in Boston, The Blue Diner.