The Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) has unveiled its latest selection of short films under the MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone programme, this year featuring four emerging directors. Shot on iPhone 17 Pro Max, the films arrive with mentorship from some of Indian cinema’s most respected names — Sriram Raghavan, Chaitanya Tamhane, Dibakar Banerjee, and Geetu Mohandas.
Each director brought a distinctly personal lens to the project. Shreela Agarwal, a former national-level boxer who returned to filmmaking after a career-ending injury, made 11.11 — a nocturnal story of two women on a first date in Mumbai. Shooting on dimly lit streets and beaches, her team used ProRes RAW to recover detail from dark environments, adjusting tint and white balance in post to produce a beautiful visual palette without the need for large lighting rigs.
Ritesh Sharma, whose roots lie in Varanasi’s street theatre tradition, directed She Sells Seashells, following a teenage Rajasthani migrant in Goa who dreams of entering a restaurant she cannot afford. Sharma used Cinematic mode to shift focus between his protagonist’s outer world and interior life, and relied on iPhone’s Audio Mix feature to manage the considerable ambient noise of the Arabian Sea and carnival crowds.
Robin Joy, who worked as associate director on Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light — recipient of the Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival — brought his long-gestating project Pathanam (Paradise Fall) to the programme. The film imagines an angel landing in an atheist’s backyard. Its most ambitious sequence, depicting the angel returning to the heavens, was completed in three weeks rather than the three months initially estimated, aided by AI-powered mask tracking in Adobe Premiere Pro running on MacBook Pro with M5.
Mentor Dibakar Banerjee (right) reviews footage of Kathar Katha (The Tale of Katha) with Dhritisree Sarkar on MacBook Pro. Picture: Apple
Dhritisree Sarkar, a PhD scholar in gender and development, wrote and directed Kathar Katha (The Tale of Katha), about a news anchor whose body begins to seal shut — a metaphor rooted in a personal reckoning with silence. Sarkar used the 8x optical zoom to draw attention inward, capturing extreme close-ups that externalise the character’s psychological state. To evoke an earlier generation of women confined to the domestic sphere, she and her cinematographer used ProRes RAW and Apple Log 2 before pushing contrast and grain heavily in post.
The programme has developed a notable track record. Last year’s Seeing Red exceeded a million views on YouTube, whilst Kovarty won Best Short Film at the Bengaluru International Short Film Festival. MAMI Mumbai Film Festival director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur has noted an uptick in independent short film production among audiences who have watched the programme’s output.
All four films are available to view on MAMI’s YouTube channel.
