Sunday evening concluded the 26th Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival, which filled the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse in Vineyard Haven and the Grange Hall in West Tisbury with five days of documentaries, short films and narrative features.
The festival, produced by Circuit Arts, was so well attended that its two venues could scarcely contain all of the eager Island filmgoers, said executive director Brian Ditchfield.
“This year’s festival exceeded our highest hopes,” he said. “Every screening sold out, which is just a remarkable testament to the passion our community has for this kind of programming.”
Though the festival’s films had origins all over the world, with some bearing Hollywood’s big names in the credits, many also had Vineyard ties or were filmed here on the Island.
“We have such an incredibly talented community,” Mr. Ditchfield said. “I feel really blessed that we get to share that work.”
One of the festival’s hyper-local films was Heartworm, directed by Miriam Louise Arens, an Edgartown native and Mr. Ditchfield’s sister, and her husband Mitchell Arens.
Shot entirely on the Vineyard, the film follows Avena, Mark and their daughter Zamira in a not-so-distant future, where most of society uses a program called NeuraLink to “tap in” and “tap out” of a virtual, AI-assisted reality.
When Zamira dies in real life but reappears spontaneously in NeuraLink, the choice between a digital world that includes the couple’s daughter and a reality without her threatens to tear the family apart.
“It’s extremely contemporary science fiction,” Mr. Arens told the Gazette in a recent interview. “It deals with everything that we as people and a culture are experiencing with tech and AI…. It has a certain urgency to it.”
Heartworm moves between its digital and non-digital worlds so rapidly that the viewer can scarcely distinguish them. In a post-screening Q&A with Circuit Arts creative director Danielle Mulcahy, Ms. Arens said the film inflicts confusion on the viewer by design.
“We really wanted to have the audience go on the journey with Avena of understanding what is real and what is not real, because I think we’re all wrestling right now in our own lives [with] what is real and what is not real on so many levels,” she said.
But attuned Heartworm viewers can sense signs of artifice. When a messy kitchen is abruptly traded for a pristine, all-glass living room, or Avena’s layers of pajamas suddenly give way to a chic pleated skirt and a cashmere pullover, it’s clear the characters have left the non-digital realm.
“There’s a cold starkness to the virtual world,” she said. “It feels the same, but the aesthetic is different.”
Though the couple started filming Heartworm on the Vineyard in 2021 and conceived of the film three years before that, the way it sees technology blur the lines between fact and fiction is more prescient that the couple could have anticipated as AI and language-learning models become more enmeshed in daily life.
“Serendipitously for the film, but not serendipitously for humanity, all of the things that we were playing with are actually playing out for us now,” Ms. Arens said.
In one scene, Avena begs a NeuraLink AI sales representative for answers about her daughter’s sudden reappearance. The rep, who appears eerily human, twitches in response to her like a short-circuiting animatronic.
In 2026, this plot point is not far off from reality. Ms. Arens recalled a maddening recent experience with a hotel’s AI phone operator, her retelling of which elicited an empathetic groan from the audience.
“[It was] plucked straight out of Heartworm,” she said.
Heartworm tackles a global hot topic, but it’s still a thoroughly Vineyard project. Over 300 Vineyarders were involved in the production of the movie, some of whom were at Friday’s screening.
“[The Vineyard] is a place that’s very dear to both of us,” Ms. Arens said, speaking for herself and Mr. Arens.
She noted that the material constraints of Vineyard living often meant needing to be inventive, especially when communicating complex, conceptual ideas onscreen. But these constraints often became assets.
“So much creativity happens with restrictions,” Ms. Arens said. “It’s just like, well, we can’t get that, we can’t go to Walgreens…. Here’s a different alternative, and that alternative is so much more beautiful or cool than you ever imagined.”
Ultimately, Islanders’ support is what made it all click.
“We knew we had the help of the community,” she said. “That was a huge thing that made this film possible.”
With the summer season approaching, Circuit Arts is gearing up to keep connecting the Vineyard community with theatre, film and the artists who create them.
Mr. Ditchfield said the next few months will bring a comedy festival, the kickoff of the YMCA drive-in, and a “Best of the Fest” screening that will bring many of the festival’s films back for round two.
In other words, the show must go on.
“The whole staff took the day off [Monday], but we’re back in the office today and dreaming up all our plans for the summer,” Mr. Ditchfield said.
This article appears in April 3, 2026.