00:03It's an annual international film festival for films made entirely or primarily on smartphones.
00:12And you'll notice from the trailer there, those are entries from the first edition.
00:18Some are horizontal and some are vertical.
00:20Some are scripted and some are factual.
00:25So it covers the whole range.
00:28But interestingly, looking back at it, what I notice is most of the vertical ones are scripted dramas.
00:35So it was already an emerging pattern.
00:37And they are coming from all around the world.
00:42And so the origins of the festival is that I was working with a director called Victoria Mapplebeck.
00:53And we made a film called Missed Call in 2018.
00:56And it ended up being the first film made specifically for YouTube to win an Academy Award.
01:05It won a TV BAFTA for the short program category.
01:09And it was really compelling to work on smartphones.
01:18Now, Victoria has gone on to make a feature derived from that short film, which interestingly is made up of footage shot on six generations of iPhones across 20 years.
01:31So it's a bit like boyhood, but in real life, if you know Richard Linklater's boyhood.
01:37Yeah.
01:39So why are we doing this?
01:41Basically, we both love the form and think it's a really important area that's a different kind of filmmaking.
01:48It has an intimacy, a speed, a spontaneity, a freshness that you don't get from any other kind of filmmaking.
01:59I guess it's a little bit like what, you know, those lightweight film cameras were for the Nouvelle Vague here.
02:08You know, this is this generation's tool of choice.
02:13And it's a really exciting one.
02:15Yeah.
02:15New way for telling stories, in fact.
02:18Yes.
02:19Which isn't very close to the advertising, in fact.
02:25No.
02:26No?
02:27No, not at all.
02:28Because, no, it's not refined in that way and it's not polished in that way and it's more immediate.
02:33So I don't, I think it's got very little connection to advertising.
02:38No, when I'm saying that, it's because, in fact, like advertising, you know, if you don't get attention from the audience immediately, it doesn't work at all.
02:50Well, that's.
02:50In that way, it looks like the same.
02:53That is the nature of online video.
02:56Exactly.
02:57The pattern is completely different.
02:58You know, I have a background in television originally, but the pattern is completely different.
03:04You literally have seconds to engage the attention.
03:09You know, like I used to say seven seconds, but I think it's like more like two or three.
03:14You know, that's how it is.
03:15Yeah, which is.
03:16It's brutal, but it's very exciting.
03:18No, no, no.
03:19I agree because it's not the same with the, I would say, the classical movie business, you know.
03:24No.
03:25You have plenty of time, you know.
03:27Yeah, no, it's completely different.
03:28It's very different.
03:29Yeah.
03:30And that.
03:30That's the new way.
03:32Yeah.
03:32And it's not a bad thing.
03:33It's just different.
03:34No, no.
03:34I'm not saying it's bad.
03:35Yeah.
03:36So we have six categories in the festival.
03:44They're split really between scripted and unscripted.
03:47So we have drama categories.
03:50We go by length.
03:51So there's over 10 minutes and under 10 minutes for drama and over 10 minutes and under 10 minutes for factual.
03:59Then there's a category for experimental.
04:02And one of the most important categories is for under one minute.
04:05In other words, the tick tock territory, which we feel is where the most exciting filmmaking is coming from.
04:13So when we first did it, which was during lockdown, we put a lot of emphasis on this one minute category.
04:23And we're carrying on with that because we still think it's super important, super energetic.
04:27And you have a lot of competitors coming.
04:31Yeah, we had we had a lot of competitors and then the actual shortlisted entries were extremely high quality and the winners are superb quality.
04:43You can see them all on on the website, which is smart, smart fest dot net.
04:50So you can see all the films there and they're very varied.
04:53But to give you a sense of.
04:56Yeah.
04:57Of the ingenuity here, the film that won the over 10 minutes scripted category, this woman in L.A.
05:07called Jennifer Zhang shot an entire feature film on her phone, but not content with that.
05:14She edited it on her phone as well.
05:16And the way she did that was she used some software designed for social video and she treated each scene as a social video.
05:27And then at the end, she output it as a playlist and it was a complete feature film.
05:32But when she did that, neither the software company nor herself knew whether that would actually work and be a seamless film.
05:40But luckily for all involved, it just played out and it was a complete 90 minute feature film, a kind of thriller, all shot in her L.A. apartment during lockdown.
05:52And, you know, it looks it can stand by any kind of, you know, Hollywood thriller sort of thing.
06:01And it's one shot movies or no, no, no, it's it's it's each book.
06:06It's just conventional scenes.
06:08But she made each each scene as an individual small film.
06:11OK, but for for your festival, you you you you you you only have a short film in only one story or you have series or you have a whole.
06:23Oh, I see. They're all singles.
06:24So so they're either longer than 10 minutes or shorter than 10 minutes, but they're all single films.
06:30They're not series.
06:31So it will be taking place in central London and online in May 2026 next year.
06:39Yeah, next year.
06:41And I just would encourage people to go and check out what's on the website to just see what's possible on the smartphone, because it is stunning.
06:51Yeah. I mean, there's a track record of it now.
06:53I guess the grandfather of it all was the foot, the movie Tangerine by Sean Baker, who won the Oscar this year.
07:01Yeah. But his first film or his first feature Tangerine was entirely shot on smartphones for not very much money.
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