Meg Ryan’s son was 10 years old when she first read William Saroyan’s 1943 novel The Human Comedy.

Now in its 10th year, the festival featured 20 films from all over the world over the course of four days.

Whether traveling aboard a wooden sloop, laden with climbing gear or carrying traditional aboriginal spears, films from around the world are about to arrive on the Vineyard. The 10th annual Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival officially begins on Thursday, Sept. 10.

All you need to travel the world this week is a seat at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center for this year’s international film festival.

In the projection room of the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center in Vineyard Haven there is one Mac computer on a desk and two small flatscreen Toshiba monitors mounted on a tall unit that controls film projection. On the floor and on a nearby table are several small crates, some orange and some muddy silver, all marked with return FedEx labels. Ship To: BURBANK, CA.

This weekend the Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival continues at venues throughout Vineyard Haven. The opening night ceremonies heralded in a new era as the first-ever film was screened at the new festival center located at 72 Beach Road in the Tisbury Marketplace.

The movie lineup continues through Sunday, at which point 22 films from around the world will have been showcased. A full schedule can be found online at mvfilmfest.com

Film Festival Honored

Those living on or visiting Martha’s Vineyard have long recognized the Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival as a particular gem. Each year Richard Paradise, the director and founder, programs numerous series of movies all year round, culminating in the four-day festival each fall. The films are always ones you can’t see anywhere else; foreign films being a particular specialty of the festival.

It’s the most fun you could have all year, maybe the most fun in five years. What I discovered at this year’s Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival was, you need a big breakfast on each of the four days and a powerful multivitamin to build your strength. Though stamina for this event has nothing to do with age: 82-year-old Doreen Kinsman is the all-time movie maximizer, able to view 12 to 14 screenings (out of 36-plus offered, three per time slot) per festival. I believe she also can leap tall buildings in a single bound.

In A Better World, a Danish thriller that won Best Foreign Film at the 2011 Academy Awards, is among the fare being offered up this weekend by the International Film Festival.

In A Better World is one of three choices being shown at 7 p.m. Friday night, this one at the Vineyard Playhouse. Ten international short films, selected by a festival jury, will be shown at the Capawock Theatre, and Marathon Boy, a documentary of a young Indian runner, will be shown at the Katherine Cornell Theatre.

While summer movies typ ically lean to big explosions, gooey romances, or gross-out comedies, films of a more thoughtful nature will be loaded into projectors next weekend as the Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival gets underway. The festival, now in its sixth year, begins on Thursday, Sept. 8 and runs throughout the weekend at locations around Vineyard Haven.

The festival is known for bringing together a broad mix of films that include both the serious and lighthearted.