In 2008 Pamela White began writing a book about her mother, Marian Steele who had died in 2001 of Alzheimers Disease. The project was both a tribute to the beloved matriarch of the family and to a celebrated artist. However, early in the project Pamela began having memory difficulties of her own and at the age of 61 was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers.

In the days and weeks following the president’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy received more than 800,000 condolence letters from all over the world. On Wednesday, Oct. 9, at 7:30 p.m. the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center in Vineyard Haven will screen a documentary that includes actors reading 20 of these letters accompanied by archival footage and Kennedy home movies recently made available. The event and documentary commemorates the 50th anniversary of the assassination, which took place on Nov. 22, 1963.

Island mom Sarah Waldman is organizing a screening of the award-winning film Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives on Thursday, Oct. 17 at Edgartown Cinemas. The film captures a spirited group of women who teach themselves how to deliver babies in a 1970s commune.

Put plainly, most of the movie footage is not terribly good. Some of it is out of focus or overexposed. Some of it lingers too long on fish lying dead on the rocks. Some of it wasn’t even shot on the Vineyard, and it takes a judicious eye to determine which scenes show the Island and which show Nauset, Cotuit or the jetties at the northern end of the Cape Cod Canal.

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.

One in every four children in America doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from.

It’s an issue that has often passed quietly under the radar and gets little attention on TV or in books. But a new film screened Wednesday night at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center, A Place at the Table, aims to change that by bringing the issue to the forefront of people’s minds.