Pocket movies want to conquer the world

Monday 16 June 2008

The fourth Pocket Film Festival in Paris has shown that directing for cell-phone screens is not just a minor cinema style. Even actress Isabella Rossellini has produced eight short films to support this growing technology and art.

A film festival just for pocket-sized movies on mobile telephones came of age in its fourth edition this weekend, with a series of flicks on the sex lives of insects by the actress Isabella Rossellini.

The minute-long films, a series of eight titled "Green Porno", are on handsets dangling on wires from a "mobile phone tree" in Paris' Pompidou Centre, for the three-day Pocket Films festival which opened Friday.

Their format -- shot exclusively for viewing on 3G technology mobile phones -- make them the "films of the future," Rossellini told AFP in an interview.

"Watching (war epic) 'Apocalypse Now' on a mobile telephone is no fun -- it was conceived as a big spectacle. But this tiny screen can be a new canvas for directors," she said.

Rossellini, 55, daughter of the actress Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto Rossellini, grabbed film-goers' attention with her disturbing erotic role as Dorothy Vallens in the 1986 David Lynch classic "Blue Velvet."

Now she has donned fake bug eyes, wings and bee-stripes for the playful mini-films, which she also wrote and produced -- adding a dash of stardom to the offbeat festival, which broke new ground when it was first held in 2005.

"If I were a firefly, I would light up my ass at night," she declares, dressed as the insect of the first film's title, before buzzing off to explain the creature's mating habits.

"I have sex several times a day," she says in another, posing as a regular fly, before demonstrating by mounting a huge toy bluebottle from behind.

The series was funded by the Sundance Institute, the body behind the Sundance independent film festival founded by the Hollywood actor Robert Redford, who granted 10,000 dollars for each short piece.

"At Sundance, there are lots of 'green' programmes -- about eating eco-labelled food, dressing and building your house with ecological materials," Rossellini said. "I said to Robert: 'What's missing is a 'green porno'!"

The eye-opening content of "Green Porno" describes erotic phenomena such as the earthworm's preference for the "69" position and the fate of the bumble bee, whose penis breaks off after sex, causing him to bleed to death.

"It was great fun to film," the actress said. "The most difficult thing was to stay dead still in the worm costume for hours, without drinking or scratching my eyelid."

After "Firefly," "Dragonfly," "Spider," "Fly," "Snail," "Bee," "Mantis" and "Worm" -- all of which were unveiled at the Berlin Film Festival in February -- Rossellini plans to make six more films in the series in September.

This year's Pocket Films, organised by the movie archive organisation Forum des Images, features dozens of works filmed with or for mobile telephones by school children, amateurs and professionals from around the world.

Some are shown on big screens, while others -- true to the innovative spirit of the festival -- can only be watched on the hanging phones of the "trees," with headphones. Some can even be downloaded by visitors onto their phones and taken away.

For the first time, the festival offers a prize for a film made exclusively for viewing on a mobile telephone -- as well as its usual award for movies shot using a phone or a digital camera.

As the festival gains momentum, more film heavyweights are also getting in on the act -- one of those in competition is "Out in There," by the Chinese director Jia Zhangke who won the Gold Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival.

The avant-garde New York artist Stephen Dwoskin, who made his two latest films using a mobile telephone, was also in Paris for the event, which ran from Friday to Sunday.

"With this edition we feel that we are witnessing a real departure. The 'fourth screen' represented by the mobile telephone is a great opportunity for creativity," the Forum's director Laurence Herszberg told AFP.