MV International Film Fest Finds Its Home

By: iO Staff, August 31, 2012

Courtesy PIFF - Frank Langella stars as an aging cat burglar who reluctantly accepts the aid of a robot helper in "Robot & Frank," a comedy-heist film screening this weekend.

Just when the summer season starts to slow down, the Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival heats up.

The festival launches its four-day, jam-packed movie spree from Thursday, September 6 to Sunday, September 9.

Now in its seventh year, the festival’s founding organizers, the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society, now have a permanent home in the newly complete Martha's Vineyard Film Center.

Located in the Tisbury Marketplace, a short walk from the Steamship Authority and Main Street, Vineyard Haven, the MV Film Center boasts a 27-foot screen, 185 stadium seats, and digital projection. During the festival, the center will serve as box office, screening venue, and post-screening party site.

“Our ongoing theme is 'Other Places,'” says MV Film Society founder and director Richard Paradise. “The Center is our new 'Other Place,' but our focus is unchanged: to present the best films from Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. The only change is now we have one more fantastic place in which to screen them.”

The festival kicks off at 8 PM on Thursday with an opening night screening of Searching for Sugar Man, a new documentary from the Academy Award-winning directors of Man on Wire, in which two South African men set out to discover what happened to their unlikely musical hero, the mysterious 1970s rock n' roller, Rodriguez.
The screening will be followed by a short film about Martha’s Vineyard singer-songwriter Ben Taylor.

The festival wraps up with a closing night film, Robot and Frank, starring Frank Langella, Liv Tyler and Susan Sarandon in a hilarious yet heartbreaking commentary about our growing dependence on technology.

A world of cinema

This year's dramas hail from all over the globe, including Norway (Oslo and August 31st); Finland (Headhunters), Paraguay (Las Acacias) and Give Up Tomorrow, set in the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Philippines.

French films are ever popular at the Festival, and this year promises an array. Director Daniel Auteuil's  The Well-Digger’s Daughter  is bound to be a festival favorite. The blending of suspense and comedy in Nobody Else But You, about a blocked writer and a beauty who thinks she's Marilyn Monroe reincarnated, promises to be both off-beat and thrilling. Rounding out this collection of new French films is All Together, which stars both Geraldine Chaplin and Jane Fonda in her first French-speaking role since the 1970s.

Among the two-dozen feature films to be presented are a wide range of documentaries covering a vast array of subjects-from global warming (Last Call at the Oasis to the Middle East (5 Broken Cameras) to the world's favorite treat (Grenada's Nothing Like Chocolate).

In 2011, the MV International Film Festival began collaborating with the Woods Hole Film Festival and the Rhode Island International Film Festival to choose one essential film for all three festivals. This year's joint selection comes from Egypt. Words of Witness, a documentary by Mai Iskander, follows a young female journalist covering Cairo's Tahrir Square protests while grappling with her mother's disapproval over her chosen profession.

Known for showcasing innovative and unusual shorts, the festival’s International Short Film Competition also returns. From the over 200 entries, 10 of the best will be screened together, with the winner chosen by a panel of judges announced at the end of the festival

Local filmmakers also get to display their talents in the short-film format via “Think Globally, Shoot Locally,” organized by Vineyarders Dan and Greg Martino.