“The documentary form is one of the very best communicators,” proclaimed Albert Maysles during his visit to Sheffield Doc/Fest in 2011, at which he received a lifetime achievement award. “If there’s a story to tell, it tells it from its source. It’s not this indirect sort of thing where somebody’s heard about it or was there, it puts you there, as a viewer, so it’s for real.”   

Maysles, who died aged 88 earlier this year, was one of the great innovators of the medium. Experimenting with new lightweight technology in the 1950s, he and his brother David dropped the rigid conventions of early documentary for a more fluid approach known as ‘Direct Cinema.’ With David on sound, and Albert on camera, the Maysles brothers went on to capture historical landmarks such as JFK’s election victory (Primary, 1960) and Beatlemania (What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA!, 1964). 

Albert emphasized the importance of having a poetic eye, and empathy, an intuitive approach that helped to form trusting relationships with his subjects, and allowed extraordinary narratives to unfold as he quietly observed. After Gimme Shelter (1970), a strikingly intimate and innovative portrait of the Rolling Stones that captured the mounting tension at the notorious Altamont concert, came his magnum opus Grey Gardens (1975), an empathetic portrait of eccentric mother and daughter duo Edith and Edie Beale beloved by the fashion world. 

For his final work Iris, previewed today, the self-confessed "truth-teller" trailed another inimitable style doyenne, Iris Apfel. The result of a four-year collaboration, the film is lesson in having a vision and cleaving to it. A humanist and an anthropologist, Maysles was passionate in his belief that documentary film could help people to better understand themselves and others, and Iris does just that. 

Iris opens in New York theaters April 29.

Sophie Brown is a writer and journalist based in London.