Convinced the Vineyard has become too busy and crowded and you are yearning for days of old, when hippies ruled the rock and the off-season was like living off the grid? Well, on Monday, May 6 at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, filmmaker Susanna Styron will take you back in time, to 1976 on the Vineyard, when she arrived with a camera to document what it took to survive an Island winter, and who wanted to take that ride.

Back then, Ms. Styron was a long-time summer visitor to the Island, but in 1975 she stuck around after the sun had set on August, taking a job at Poole’s Fish Market. The winter experience was so fascinating and extreme — she only made it to January before hightailing it to Boston — that the next year she returned to film it.

The result is Suspended Sentence, her documentary of the experience and the people she met.

“I knew it in my bones, so it felt right to be making a film about it, I could go deep and understand what I was looking at,” she said in a 2017 interview with the Gazette, when the film played at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival.

The screening begins at 5:30 p.m. and the Ms. Styron will be on hand to answer questions.

The 25-minute black and white film features many familiar faces passing the time in the off-season, working, playing and hanging out. It also shows the hard times, such as welfare lines as people without a paycheck (not many jobs then in winter) looked to get enough to eat.

“We realized, as the story evolved, obviously it came to be about not only what people were seeking but what people were finding, and part of that was it was really difficult to make a living,” Ms. Styron said in the 2017 interview. “An unemployment line is a pretty good expression of how many people are out of work.”

Ms. Styron went on to become an award-winning filmmaker and writer. Her latest documentary short, My Father’s Name, will be released later this year.