The Pocket Film Festival kicked off on June 8 aiming at to showcase an emerging art form and prove that the mobile phone is rapidly becoming the "fourth screen" in our lives, after the cinema, television and the Internet.
Some 200 films from Japan, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, China, the United States and elsewhere had shown at the Pompidou Centre in Paris alongside a crop of French works. They range in length from less than a minute to an hour-and-a-half and span fiction, documentary, cartoon and experimental video.
The mobile phone technology that has brought about the democratisation of film-making has moved on rapidly since the first edition of the Pocket Festival two years ago.
Many of the films on show here have a freshness and intimacy that harks back to the days of grainy Super 8 home movies, but others are slick professional productions.
Now, said festival director Laurence Herszberg, it is often impossible to tell if a film has been shot on a phone or with a regular video camera. And the people making creative phone films have changed too. At first it was a largely amateur affair undertaken by artists from other disciplines.
"Several cinema directors have turned to mobiles," Herszberg told AFP. "That doesn't mean they're going to give up mainstream movie-making, but they find the exercise very interesting."
Canadian film-maker Denis Villeneuve, who has had his work shown at Cannes and was nominated for the best foreign movie award at the Oscars, is one. He made "120 seconds to get elected," a satirical spoof documentary on a campaigning populist politician, to be watched on a mobile phone.
Herszberg also noted that mobile phone companies in Japan, where TV on-the-move is already a big hit, have begun commissioning artists to make "video ringtones" - very short movies, usually animated, that play when your phone rings.
"This is throwing up interesting new modes of financing video creation," said Herszberg, whose Forum des Images film centre has borrowed the Pompidou Centre's cinema screens while its own premises undergoes major renovation.
With mobile phone operators keen to recoup their massive investments in the powerful 3G networks, videophone content is attracting increasing attention, and more and more leading TV and film studios are making their shows available on this new platform.
All the movies to be screened at the Pocket Festival event were either made with mobile phones for viewing on phones or on cinema screens, or were made with regular cameras to be shown on phone screens. The three-day event started on June 8 with a series of debates and workshops on the artistic, commercial and social aspects of mobile phone films, with screening of the movies due to begin later in the day.
The festival, sponsored by French mobile operator SFR, closed on Sunday with cash prizes and top-of-the-range mobile phones for the best movies among the 26 works in the official competition.
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