One of the Island’s most prominent summer events, the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, this week issued a call for submissions to its 25th-anniversary festival in 2027.
But exact dates for the film series are up in the air, due to uncertainty over when the Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center may be available for public use next summer.
The 790-seat auditorium, which has been the film festival’s home for the past decade and a half, will lose its parking area at the end of the current school year, when the $333.5 million Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School project gets under way.
As the future home of the high school’s first two-story classroom wing, the parking lot will become an active construction site as soon as school lets out in June, according to the work plan from project management firm W.T. Rich.
The performing arts center building also will be affected by the removal of nearby classrooms to make way for new administrative offices, Evan Moore of W.T. Rich told the high school building committee Sept. 29.
Mr. Moore said the performing arts center could be available for part of the summer, but public entrances will have to change and the Oak Bluffs building and fire departments will need to issue new occupancy permits.
The final decision on whether or not to allow public events at the performing arts center during construction will be up to the regional high school committee, once the building committee makes its recommendation.
That can’t happen until, at the earliest, November, when Tappé Architects is scheduled to deliver its designs for the building work.
Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival co-founder Stephanie Rance said the uncertainty is preying on Island businesses that rely on the festival for crucial revenue in August.
“We’re just in a precarious predicament right now [because] all of these businesses and hotels … are really banking on this happening so they can meet their bottom line,” she told the building committee.
“I don’t know what to say to them,” Ms. Rance said, asking the committee if she could go ahead and publicize the 2027 festival week.
“If we announce our dates as July 30 to August 7, I’m not understanding what the issue would be with that, because we would just figure it out as we go along,” she said.
“Whatever we have to do is what we have to do … We will work with you to make this a success for everybody,” Ms. Rance said.
Unfortunately, it’s just too soon to guarantee specific dates, said Amy Houghton, who sits on the building committee and the high school committee and chairs the all-Island school committee.
“Until we have approval from the town of Oak Bluffs … I don’t think that we’re in a position to say that it’s absolutely a go-ahead for the dates that you just mentioned,” Ms. Houghton said.
“I would hate for you to say that and then have the town of Oak Bluffs come back and say ‘We’re not comfortable with the egress, we’re not comfortable with any of that,’ so we can’t,” she said.
The Island’s largest indoor theatre by hundreds of seats, the performing arts center is where Ms. Rance and her husband, Floyd Rance, held their first Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival in 2002.
At the time, only a handful of people attended, and the film festival moved to smaller venues for several years. But as the audience grew, the festival returned to the performing arts center in 2012.
The Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival now attracts thousands of people each summer, including film stars and other celebrities whose appearances draw national media attention