African-American and Hispanic households, the majority uptown, lack basic financial education and services. (Graph by Tim Kiladze. Source: Pew Charitable Trusts, 2009)

On a sunny autumn Friday, Bader Bahmad and fellow members of a financial education seminar at the Fort Washington Public Library branch were discussing rudimentary principles, such as the difference between needs and wants.

In a run-down conference room on the library’s deserted second floor, they talked about saving money. Asked to give examples of items they should save for, one woman mentioned a $7.99 blouse she saw earlier in the week and another said a pack of cigarettes. A talkative blonde said she has never saved for anything.

Cheryl Hines of Cornell University’s Cooperative Extension community program led the discussion. She provided handouts that explained the difference between short, medium and long-term savings goals; she offered tips for tracking money, like using a notebook to record expenditures.

Bahmad, 39, found the seminar a bit basic, but she liked the reminders because she and her three children are supported solely by her husband’s earnings as a taxi driver. She strictly limits spending on discretionary goods. “In every hour of the day, if I don’t need it, I’m not doing it,” Bahmad said.

Badmad’s struggle is complicated. In Washington Heights where she lives, families are lucky to have a bank account. While 12 percent of Manhattan households don’t have a standard checking account, 25 percent of African Americans and 27 percent of Hispanics in Manhattan – the majority populations uptown – live unbanked, according to a survey last year by Pew Charitable Trusts. In effect, they pay an average $1,042 annually in check cashing fees.

Bahmad has been trying to make ends meet in the U.S. for close to 15 years. An immigrant from Lebanon, she used to sew scarves and dresses for stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan. When she returned to her home country three years ago to be closer to her family, leaving her husband behind in New York, she sold her sewing machines.

But the distance strained her marriage, and Bahmad returned to New York after two years. “Here you’re missing something, over there you’re missing something,” she said.

Now back in America without a job, Bahmad is looking for financial advice. As a start, she attended the free seminar at the Public Library.

Instructor Milly DuBouchet, who teaches similar classes in Washington Heights, finds it hard to address intricate financial problems because her audience has never had the means to save money. “It’s hard for them to save 10 percent of their income monthly when they can’t necessarily pay their phone bill every month,” she said. “Financial literacy is at a bare minimum in our community.”

To help, the Bloomberg administration created the Office of Financial Empowerment, where DuBouchet also works. It offers personal finance workshops and free private counseling.

Lower-income people may lack a basic understanding of credit ratings and the principles of debt, according to DuBouchet. Many of her clients have been denied loans and “they want to see why,” she said. Moreover, “A lot of people consider credit cards quote unquote free money.” She tries to tell her seminar members and private clients how FICO scores are compiled and reminds those in debt, “If you stop paying it, they don’t forget about you.”

Workshops offering basic financial information can be found all over upper Manhattan. Friends Jenny Gil and Angela Ariza attended one specifically for women at City College. Both women, immigrants from Colombia, readily admit they know little about personal finance.

Gil, 27, is lucky to have less than $5,000 in debt, which she described as “not impossible.” She works in a restaurant office and is trying to repay what she owes so that she can start saving and investing – only she doesn’t know how.

She blames her financial illiteracy on Colombian cultural norms. She was raised with the belief that women don’t handle finances because they are too complex. “It’s the new days and now women take care of their own business,” she said.

Gil has done some reading on her own, like “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki, but still has trouble grasping certain fundamental financial concepts. To remedy the problem, she thinks personal finances should become part of the high school curriculum.

Donny Lynn Burton agrees. A vice president at the Harlem office of the non-profit Operation Hope, which offers seminars in credit and money management as well as individual credit counseling, she constantly meets people in similar situations.
Her clients live very differently from the middle class. “They live paycheck to paycheck,” Burton said. “They don’t understand the benefits of having an account” in a bank. She shows them how to create budgets and has them come in regularly to stay on track.

But often they start much too late, which she blames on pride. It frustrates her that most people in foreclosure know what lies ahead but don’t take action. ‘They never try to call their bank to work something out,” Burton said. She spends a lot of time assuring her clients that they can negotiate because the bank is better off if they stay in their homes.

She, too, would like to see financial education begin in high school, before people wade into major financial decisions.

Filmmaker Albert Maysles behind his desk at the Maysles Institute (Photo by Sam Petulla)

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 shot: 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 which Maysles did cinematography for are set for release— 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. 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 by talking with artists, scholars, critics and international political representatives

The Maysles Institute Cinema (Photo by Sam Petulla)

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 — 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, 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. The conversation stayed focused, 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.  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.”