Brianna Gonzalez–Bonacci, Luis Antonio Ramos, Fatima Ptacek, and Gabriela Velez answer questions onstage after the Oct. 1 premiere. (Photo by Jason Alcorn)

Movie stars brushed shoulders with neighborhood luminaries and friends and family of the cast when “The Miracle of Spanish Harlem” premiered in distinctly local style on Oct. 1. “We want to give this movie to the neighborhood first,” director Derek Partridge said days before the East Harlem screening. “The neighborhood connected and got what we were doing. They came out whenever we needed them.” The film, which was shot in uptown Manhattan for 25 days last winter, earned a rousing cheer as soon as the theater lights dimmed and again and again when so many familiar names appeared in the ending credits.

“I was overwhelmed at the quality of this film,” said New York Supreme Court Judge Edwin Torres, an East Harlem native and author of the novel “Carlito’s Way,” which was later adapted for film. “What they’ve done is just magnificent as far as I’m concerned.”

Neighborhood residents will recognize street scenes on 115th and 116th Streets east of First Avenue and at the local nightspot FB Lounge. Set designers transformed a vacant corner bodega at 154th Street and Amsterdam Avenue for interior scenes, production coordinator Eleni Goros says.

Juan’s Beauty Salon, three doors down from the bodega, lost business when trailers lined up along Amsterdam Avenue for two weeks, said Juan Reyes, the owner. “They take more space than they need, too much space,” he said. “Customers couldn’t find parking on the street.” But most local residents simply enjoyed watching, said the movie’s young actresses, Fátima Ptacek and Brianna Gonzalez–Bonacci. “Every time we were on set, people from the neighborhood would hang around and try to talk with us,” said Ptacek, 10. “Everybody seemed to be excited for us.”

Filmmakers in New York may not often come to Harlem, but the uptown movie scene has a rich history. Scenes from classic movies like “The Godfather,” “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” and “Midnight Cowboy” were shot at the old Filmways Studios, now a parking lot on East 127th Street. And director Luc Besson used the exterior of a building on East 97th Street for 1994’s “The Professional.”

Still, filmmakers in New York amass nearly 30,000 shooting days annually, according to the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting, and the office is working to increase the number of shoots in less familiar corners of Manhattan and the outer boroughs. “All of New York City is experiencing an increase in production,” said a spokeswoman for the film office, Marybeth Ihle. “Location managers are constantly looking for that new location, the site that hasn’t been seen on screen before.”

Bringing filming to low-income neighborhoods can benefit the community and local business. It can raise a neighborhood’s profile, bring in foot traffic, and burnish the cultural reputation of a place like East Harlem. Appearing on film, New York architect James Sanders wrote in “America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York,” can temporarily transform a neighborhood, “as a place to be enjoyed, a landscape to be explored.”

The audience waits for the first screening of “The Miracle of Spanish Harlem” to begin. (Photo by Jason Alcorn)

Carlos Bermudez’s script tells the story of Tito Jimenez, a widowed father of two who owns a bodega in East Harlem. He can’t catch a break until out-of-towner Eva Del Pilar comes into his life. “It’s a story of love, faith, sin and redemption,” Partridge said.

Jimenez is played by Luis Antonio Ramos, a Puerto Rican-born character actor with television roles in “CSI” and “The Shield.” Mexican star Kate del Castillo, known in the United States for her work in the Showtime drama “Weeds,” portrays Eva. Others in the film have personal ties to New York: Andre Royo, who made his name in “The Wire” and Tony Award-winner Priscilla Lopez both grew up in the Bronx.

Partridge hopes a larger message comes through, too. “It’s a census year, Arizona is being sued, and there is not enough content showing Latinos in a positive light,” he said. “I’m Puerto Rican and Greek. And I’ve been waiting for positive images of Latinos to show that we’re part of the fabric of this country.” With that goal, he’s part of a broader movement in East Harlem to elevate Latino and Latin American voices in film.

“The thing about film is that it’s really easy to convey values and ideas by telling a story,” said Gonzalo Casals, director of education and public programs at El Museo del Barrio.  “That’s what we try to do at El Museo, an open dialogue about what we think we should be discussing with our audience.” Casals oversees the monthly “Nuevo Cine” film series at the museum, where he aims to include at least one New York production every year. It’s hard to find enough Latino films from just uptown, he says. The next film in the series is 2009’s “Os Famosos e os Duendes da Morte” from Brazil, on Nov. 3.

After a second screening in New York earlier this month, Partridge is now taking “Miracle” to Los Angeles, where he hopes to find a distributor to release the movie in time for the holidays next year. “No one’s celebrating anything yet,” he says. “Hopefully it does resonate with the people that want to take this further.”

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.”