Ticket sales start Friday for the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival, which brings more than three dozen new documentaries, features and shorts from around the world — including the Vineyard — to West Tisbury and Vineyard Haven March 22 through March 26.
Island director Ollie Becker has two short documentaries in the festival line-up released this week: Martha’s Vineyard Skatepark and Waiting to Continue: The Venezuelan Asylum Seekers on Martha’s Vineyard.
Other Island filmmakers traveled much farther afield for their documentaries, Angela Andersen’s tech-industry exposé Utopia: Wild Visions in Silicon Valley and Len Morris’s Butterfly, Butterfly, investigating the human rights of children worldwide.
Director Matt Taylor even went back in time, drawing from 2005 footage of Vineyard farmers for his film titled David Flanders, Simon Athearn, and Bob Woodruff, which will screen with Martha’s Vineyard Skatepark and Fish Stories, a documentary produced by Chris Fischer, in the annual Vineyard Shorts program.
Festival audiences also will get a look at works in progress from four young documentarians of color, sponsored by seasonal Island residents Marcia Smith and Stanley Nelson’s Firelight Media nonprofit.
The festival’s full-length documentaries range from revealing portraits of cultural figures — among them 20th-century French mime Marcel Marceau, musicians Amy Ray and Emily Saliers (the Indigo Girls) and contemporary basketball superstar Stephen Curry — to a close-up look at Ukraine in its eighth year of armed conflict with Russia, from a Ukrainian director who will join the audience for a post-screening discussion.
A Seekonk center for working dogs with PTSD and a tribal newspaper in Oklahoma stripped of its press freedoms are among other documentary subjects in the festival, which also is screening an untitled “exclusive look at a new, feature-length documentary in progress from a widely-known director.”
Drama and comedy films in the line-up include Flamin’ Hot, a biopic celebrating Mexican-American culture and Cheetos; Saloum, a horror thriller from Senegal; British romantic comedy Rye Lane and movies set in South Korea, Pakistan and Oregon.
Along with Vineyard Shorts, the festival has four other programs of short subjects.
Documentary Shorts: When All Else Fails presents I Never Had Dreams of My Son, about a Ukrainian father’s search for his missing son; The Lesbian Bar Project, tracing a key element of queer history; and Clean, a female-centered view of addiction and long-term recovery.
Island choreographers Abby Bender and Jesse Jason host Dance Shorts: Camera and Choreography, with quick live performances in between short dance films from the U.S., Norway, Australia, China and South Korea.
Narrative Shorts: Connections includes a family-friendly three minutes with a talking baseball as it takes on life, a Danish graphic novel adaptation set in Greenland and two other films.
Tickets for the festival go on sale at noon Friday at tmvff.org, where the screening times and locations will also be announced.
An alphabetized list of the films is posted at tmvff.org/2023filmsaz.
Headquartered at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury, the festival will also hold screenings at the First Congregational Church of West Tisbury and the Capawock Theatre in Vineyard Haven.
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