Four emerging filmmakers bend cultural and creative lines for MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone

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  16 April 2025

  UPDATE

  Four emerging filmmakers bend cultural and creative lines for MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone

  From a horror-comedy in Tamil to a magical romance in Malayalam, MAMI Select filmmakers are redefining cinema with iPhone 16 Pro Max

  Konkona Sen Sharma, the National Film Award-winning filmmaker and actor, believes that beyond technology, a filmmaker’s most important tool is courage.

  “With iPhone, there’s so much power contained in such a compact package that you can bypass the conventions of mainstream filmmaking,” she says. “All you need is a great idea, and the guts and determination to follow through with it.”

  Alongside fellow Indian film industry icons Vikramaditya Motwane, Lijo Jose Pellissery, and Vetri Maaran, Sen Sharma is mentoring four emerging filmmakers selected by the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI) to create short films for the 2025 MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone program, now in its second year. Two of last year’s participating films recently won Critics Choice awards for Best Short Film, Best Director (Short Film), and Best Writing (Short Film).

  “Shooting on iPhone allows for complete personal expression,” says Maaran. He believes he is learning as much from his mentees as he is teaching them. “We’re living in the age of democracy in filmmaking.”

  The filmmakers — Amrita Bagchi, Rohin Raveendran Nair, Chanakya Vyas, and Shalini Vijayakumar — are discovering new cinematic worlds through the lens of iPhone 16 Pro Max.

  “The unique voices of these filmmakers are beautifully contextualised through the four languages and regions of India in which they are rooted,” says MAMI festival director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur.

  “These are very passionate people with important stories to tell,” says Pellissery. “Shooting on iPhone, they are pushing their own limits with fantastic results.”

  Each filmmaker leveraged the powerful capabilities of MacBook Pro with the M4 Max chip to weave their stories together. “Shooting and editing within the Apple family of products gives you a stellar advantage: speed,” says Motwane. That whip-fast performance of MacBook Pro alongside the ease of use of iPhone 16 Pro Max is giving these artists even more creative control on and off set.

  Navigating childhood and change, legacy, and liberation, Bagchi, Nair, Vyas, and Vijayakumar will premiere their stories in Mumbai today.

  Creating Claustrophobia with Cinematic Mode

  With a background in design, acting, singing, and songwriting, Amrita Bagchi feels she was always destined to be a filmmaker. “It’s like a confluence of all the art forms,” she says.

  Bagchi, whose short film Succulent won the Grand Jury Prize at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, hails from Kolkata, the city in West Bengal, India, that has produced cinematic stalwarts like Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. It’s also the home of many a spooky story.

  Her new short film, Tinctoria, is a psychological thriller inspired by actual historical events. It tells the story of a modern-day fashion mogul whose ancestral legacy is built on the skeletons of indigo farmers from the colonial era — the ghosts of whom quite literally come back to haunt her.

  To create the immersive, claustrophobic atmosphere of a thriller, Bagchi is engaging Cinematic mode for the film’s opening montage. “We’re tracking bubbles and plastic sheets flying through the air, and the depth of field is so clean,” she says. “Just like it’s shot on a huge, high-budget cinematic camera.”

  Bagchi believes her film could never have been shot through traditional means.

  “It was a very ambitious production, but with iPhone 16 Pro Max, I can constantly create and improvise,” she says. “That edginess of movement, it’s like visual rap.”

  With graphically demanding workflows — like overlaying the industry-standard Rec. 709 color space on ProRes Log footage captured on iPhone — she is surprised that her M4 Max MacBook Pro hasn’t lagged once.

  “It’s like a rocket machine,” she says. “On a tight schedule I can just shoot at 4K120 fps on my iPhone, and still have tremendous flexibility to change the pacing during the edit on my MacBook Pro.”

  The theme of legacy runs strong with Bagchi, and not just in her film. “We want to emulate pioneers like Satyajit Ray. He didn’t let the conventions of his time dictate his story,” she says.

  ProRes Paints a Coastal Canvas

  “Even though I grew up in New Delhi, I’ve always been exposed to Kerala’s brave, daring cinema,” says Rohin Raveendran Nair, a director, writer, and cinematographer whose credits include Netflix shows like Sacred Games and Black Warrant.

  Nair’s short film Kovarty takes him back to his roots, deep in Kerala’s breathtaking Alleppey backwaters. A love story tinged with magical realism, it showcases the relationship between a typewriter and typist. Qwerty, as the typewriter is christened, is slowly transformed by the lilting Keralite accent into Kovarty. This acts as a metaphor for the film’s major theme: change.

  The prospect of shooting on iPhone 16 Pro Max was instrumental in Nair’s choice of narrative. “Using iPhone’s small form factor, I could place the camera inside the typewriter and capture its POV,” he says. “This, along with practical effects with fish wires, helps bring the device to life.”

  Nair is framing his point of view shots in a 4:3 aspect ratio to emulate the verticality of a sheet of paper. These are juxtaposed against a wider 2:1 aspect ratio when capturing the expansive backwater landscapes. For some old-world charm, he also uses a bloom filter to create a halo around the highlights.

  Nair believes iPhone 16 Pro Max will complement the coastal town’s vivid blue-greens.

  “One day our location is bright and sunny, the next it’s cloudy and gloomy,” he says. “The camera captures such rich detail with ProRes Log in all sorts of lighting situations.”

  Action Mode Helps Cut Through the Noise

  For his new short film Mangya, educator and thespian Chanakya Vyas found inspiration in an unusual place. “It may seem obsolete, but a newspaper is a great place to discover stories,” he says.

  Vyas — whose short film Loo was nominated for Best Short Film (Narrative) at the New York Indian Film Festival — went down a rabbit hole after reading an article about an avian flu outbreak in suburban Mumbai. That, combined with the devastating loss of his golden retriever, inspired his new short film.

  Mangya is a coming-of-age tale about an 11-year-old boy and his pet, the titular rooster. “Losing a pet is very different from the loss of another person,” muses Vyas. “What started out as a story about a lonely boy, eventually became one about letting go.”

  For a key scene in the film, Vyas is tracking his actor for 300 metres just before the break of dawn.

  “There’s no time to mount the camera on a traditional gimbal,” he says. “But with Action mode, I could even shoot multiple takes. The stabilisation is just so impressive.”

  Recording clean sound in a country as loud as India can be tricky, but Vyas is incorporating the cacophony into his milieux.

  “We’re able to layer footsteps, the rooster crowing, and the whirring sound of a fan with distinct clarity with the studio-quality mics on iPhone 16 Pro Max,” he says. “The native audio is that good in its bit rate and cadence.”

  Out amidst the chicken coops while on set, Vyas relies on the nano-texture display of his MacBook Pro, which dramatically reduces glare and distractions from reflections coming from the overhead sun as he reviews the continuity of his shots. Nano-texture is a game-changing experience when working outdoors.

  “For a director, the most important thing is how the footage will turn out,” Vyas says. “Thankfully the Liquid Retina XDR display on my MacBook Pro gives me an accurate representation of the actual colours we will see in the finished version.”

  Screaming in Slow Motion

  Growing up in a traditional Tamil-speaking home in Chennai, filmmaker Shalini Vijayakumar loved hearing stories about her mother’s large family. “Some used to be funny, others were sad,” she says.

  “Some were about an uncle who used to talk to ghosts,” she continues. “As a 6-year-old, I would imagine myself in my mom’s place — full of stories to tell.”

  Her influences all come together in her new short film, Seeing Red, a comedic horror film about the quashed emotions of the women in a large Tamil household.

  Set in the 1980s, the film begins with three different women screaming in horror after seeing a ghost. It ends with them screaming to express a collective, repressed rage. “It’s like a journey from being scared to being angry,” she says. “The actors enjoy just getting to shout at the top of their lungs. And I scream with them because I’m also letting it all out.”

  To depict the scream, Vijayakumar is inverting a traditionally masculine visual device from Tamil cinema using iPhone 16 Pro Max. “I call these the ‘mass shots’ where the heroes walk dramatically in slow motion,” she says. “I’m doing that for the women in 4K120 fps, and it looks fabulous.”

  For more tightly framed shots, the 120 mm lens on iPhone 16 Pro Max allows her to bring together her narrative, milieux, staging, and theme in a single shot that she composed using Procreate on iPad.

  “Using the 5x Telephoto lens, I’m able to place the men in front as they discuss the fate of the women in the background,” Vijayakumar explains. “There’s so much storytelling in that one frame through that particular lens.”

  For all the complexities of theme, technology, and technique, both Vijayakumar and Seeing Red possess an ephemeral lightness of spirit. “My hope is that everyone has fun and remembers that women screamed in it!”

  Vikramaditya Motwane, the award-winning director and program mentor, is convinced the four MAMI Select filmmakers can carry forward the legacy of visionaries like Orson Welles and Satyajit Ray. “These filmmakers can be the pioneers who take the camera to places we’ve never seen before,” he says.

  Watch these four short films on the MAMI YouTube channel.

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