The Martha's Vineyard Film Festival's four-day event featured 20 movies. In between screenings, filmgoers walked around, mingled with one another and sipped on Chilmark Coffee Company java.
The Martha's Vineyard Film Festival opens on Thursday, March 13, with over 20 films, including features and documentaries, being shown during the weekend. The opening night film to be screened at the Edgartown Cinema's is Fading Gigolo produced by West Tisbury summer resident Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte.
Author Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, examined trends in American society and concluded that the country was growing apart due to lack of community involvement. His thesis pointed to a disengaged populace that was more isolated and therefore less likely to be empathetic. The traditional outlets for bringing a community together were no longer thriving, he said, from bowling leagues to PTA meetings, and as a result the country as a whole was suffering.
The common room of the Chilmark School rustled with popcorn bags and whispers on Friday afternoon as the entire school, kindergarten through fifth grades, prepared to become the audience for their own animated films. The projector screen lit up and animated puppets hula-hooped, built forts, played four square, shared snacks and engaged in lively dialogue about conflict, compromise and cooperation.
Next weekend, moviegoers will gather at the Chilmark Community Center for the 13th Annual Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival. They will sit on bales of straw in the Hay Café and eat chef Chris Fischer’s home-cooked meals. But mostly, they will seat themselves in the cozy main room of the Chilmark Community Center, ready to get lost in the onscreen worlds of the 14 films in this year’s lineup.
Amid the stacks of DVDs and under the piles of papers, press photos
and programs, the sixth annual Martha's Vineyard Independent Film
Festival is coming together.
Slowly.
"This is the crunch time, for sure," festival founder
and director Thomas Bena says one afternoon last week from the festival
headquarters in North Tisbury. "We still have a lot to do."
In the disturbing yet vital film Taxi to the Dark Side, Army Specialist Damien Corsetti, one of six interrogators who confessed to torturing and killing an innocent taxi driver at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan in 2002, stoically peers into the camera and tries to justify his actions.
“When you look at people as less than human, you find yourself doing unthinkable things,” Mr. Corsetti says of his role in the death of Dilawar, the young Afghani wrongly accused of being the trigger man in a rocket attack.
Richard Paradise was named 2009’s best regional film festival director at last month’s International Film Festival Summit in Las Vegas. In an Oscar-speech moment with the Gazette, he shared his glory with Island filmgoers: “The success of the festival, the regional coverage, the volunteership, and the exploration of other cultures ... the Vineyard audience contributes.”
It took the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival about three years to get into the casual character it has enjoyed for the past seven. In the first year, a black and white printout distributed the day before the Grange Hall screenings announced a one-day program consisting of a collection of shorts, a few features and some ethnic food. The next year, a move to the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven eliminated the food; eating wasn’t allowed at the site, so the festival moved again.
