Movies for the very small screen celebrated in Paris festival
Showbiz Desk

PARIS—France is the country that gave birth to cinema, and this weekend it pushed the seventh art a creative and technological step forward by hosting a film festival dedicated to movies shot entirely with mobile telephones. Several months ago the Forum des Images, the Paris film centre hosting the event, handed out 100 third-generation (3G) phones to film-makers, writers, musicians, and other creative types and told them to go off and experiment.
The Pocket Film Festival, which sought to both showcase an emerging art form and ponder what effect it might have on mainstream moviemaking, this weekend screened their works. These included thrillers, mini soap operas and parody science fiction and ranged from 30-second shorts to a full-length feature set in Rome.
Some of the works were little more than fun films anyone fooling around with a mobile phone might have produced. “Pendulum,” for example, was entertainingly odd but consisted of nothing more than a pendulum swinging back and forth, revealing in a reflection a man filming it with a phone camera. But most of the films displayed greater talent and better use of the phone camera, and many had a freshness and intimacy that harked back to the days of grainy Super 8 home movies.