An original movie poster the size of a door leans against one wall, with photos of the Rolling Stones breaking the words GIMME and SHELTER into two fat rows. On another wall, a large photo shows Edith Beale, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s aunt, a young girl at the time, holding her mother’s hand, seeming nothing like the 78-year-old living a life of squalor and eccentricity in the Hamptons in the film “Grey Gardens.” Behind his desk, 82-year-old Albert Maysles leafs through film catalogs, a colorful blanket draped over his shoulders, surrounded by photographers, posters, and paintings from these films and others — all of which he directed.  He’s choosing which films he’s decided to show next month in a film series.

It’s what he does nearly every month. Since 2005, he has helped run the Maysles Institute, an arts center. Tucked between the Black River Center for Performance Arts and an out-of-business fried chicken restaurant at 127th Street and Lenox Avenue, it’s the kind of tiny place that’s easy to miss but opens up like a wide-angle panorama: there’s a film school with classrooms, a community center, a popcorn stand and a small (capacity: 60) but charming cinema. Rugs and cushions from around the world supplement its folding-chair seating. Some nights, a panel follows the screening, and the braver in the crowd can pick a director’s brain, clash with a journalist, or debate a U.N. representative from the country the movie depicts.

Maysles is a decorated documentarian seasoned by more than 45 years in Hollywood filmmaking. He directed the Rolling Stones’ 1969 tour documentary “Gimme Shelter”; “Salesman,” which in 1969 New York Times reviewer David Canby said he “can’t imagine its ever seeming irrelevant;” the Beatles documentary “What’s Happening! The Beatles in America”; the documentary “Grey Gardens,” which HBO recently remade as a drama; and many more.

Next year, two films are set for release for which Maysles did cinematography — a Keith Haring documentary and “Hollywood Renegade”, a film about Budd Schulberg, the screenwriter for “On the Waterfront” and “A Face in the Crowd.”

When Maysles came to Harlem in 2005, he didn’t just set up a cinema; he brought his life. He moved with his wife into a brownstone a few blocks from the institute and asked all of his children — he has four — to join him in the neighborhood. From his old home — at the Dakota at Central Park West and 73rd Street — to his new home at 122nd and Lenox Avenue is at most a few miles, but culturally, Maysles understood uptown as practically another country, and he wanted in.

“We were looking at Brooklyn,” Maysles said. “I said to my wife that I would much prefer Harlem.”

Here, “everywhere you go you have conversations, and you feel welcome to join in,” he explained. “There’s a courtesy here you don’t feel elsewhere. We built that around the institute.”

Besides showing his handpicked dream film line-ups, mostly of documentaries, Maysles has tried to remake movie-going. Guided by the give-and-take of a conversation, and how it can deepen understanding of a film, the Maysles institute brings the audience almost into the movies by creating a live forum where the audience and filmmaker can interact.

Jason Fox, who helps coordinate film series, explained. “We’re trying to create a space for the people we reach out to, to garner participation, to push the idea that cinema is an active idea,” he said. The goal, Fox said, is to give viewers the chance to grapple with the questions a film poses through dialogues with artists, scholars, critics and international political representatives

Just as Maysles believes there’s better conversation in Harlem than anywhere in New York, no other film institute in New York puts as much emphasis on talking.

“We found a 20-year-old film about a South Bronx gang,” he recalled. “For the Q and A, we had the director and one of the gang members.”

Another night, local Dominican and Haitian immigrants tangled in a hot debate, with some in the audience going so far as to get out of their seats, point each other out across the aisle, and shout out opinions — even if it meant interrupting a visiting speaker. Bill Haney’s film “The Price of Sugar,” narrated by Paul Newman, had just shown, depicting a Spanish priest who tries to free thousands of forced Haitian laborers. At one point, freed Haitians cross the border to the Dominican Republic, but their escape backfires when a tide of bitter ethnic rejection swells into national protest.  In response, the Dominican Republic government deports the fleeing Haitians back home, annulling any shot at political asylum.

After the film, the panel started, and feelings that had been silent were given the floor. Different women rose from their seats, angry and aggrieved, giving back different interpretation of the events to the panels and to each another, while other moviegoers called for things to cool down. Eventually, the discussion turned toward relations uptown, which everyone agreed are still troubled. Yet the conversation stayed real, and as the talk closed audience members agreed that to forget that tensions uptown will persist as long as problems back home are unresolved would be the most egregious mistake.

For Maysles, the institute represented a new start, a place where he could expand his approach to showing documentaries and extend his filmmaking gifts into other realms.  He occasionally lends his eye and hand to students, who can enroll in year-round classes or a six-week summer session

The Maysles Cinema is directed by co-directors Jessica Green and Albert Maysles’s son, Philip Maysles, who coordinate every series, and the films are picked by various staff members and guest curators.  The Maysles Institute is cooperatively run.

The institute relies on various funding sources. “We are supported by city and state funding, as well as private foundations and individual donors, in addition to the ticket revenue that we generate through our suggested-donation ticket model,” said Fox.

Maysles had fond memories of last summer.

“We took the graduating class of students, and we showed their films, and they did the Q and A,” he said. “I remember them standing in front of the audience, and one of the audience members asked the question, ‘Do any of you plan to continue your education in film and become filmmakers?’ And every one of their hands went up.”