The Martha’s Vineyard Film Society made a giant leap toward its dream of a permanent home on Thursday night when the Martha’s Vineyard Commission approved a new 6,000-square-foot, 190-seat theatre at the Tisbury Marketplace overlooking Lagoon Pond off Beach Road in Vineyard Haven.

The developer for the project is architect Sam Dunn, who built the marketplace in 1984. The tenant will be Richard Paradise’s itinerant, nonprofit film society.

Last Friday and Saturday Vineyarders, along with moviegoers in 200 cities across six continents, participated in the Manhattan Short Film Festival. Local cineastes crowded the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven for a billing of 10 international short films and voted on their favorites. This week the votes are tallied worldwide and a winner is crowned.

“I don’t know of any other film festival like it,” said Richard Paradise of the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society, which presented the series.

While filmmakers were picking up Oscars in Los Angeles, guests at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society party Sunday night t the Oyster Bar Grill also picked up a statue — an Academy Award brought by an Islander whose father won the prestigious statue in 1948 for a short film documentary while serving in the Army Signal Corps..