Ritesh Sharma uses the Blackmagic Camera app on iPhone 17 Pro Max while framing Maruti, his film’s protagonist, selling trinkets on the beach.

Apple

The MAMI Select: Filmed On iPhone program is in its third year, and the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) has unveiled four new short films shot on the iPhone 17 Pro Max. These films, set in Mumbai, Kerala, Goa, and Bengal, were mentored by some of Indian cinema's most respected names, including Sriram Raghavan, Chaitanya Tamhane, Dibakar Banerjee, and Geetu Mohandas.

The MAMI Select: Filmed On iPhone initiative empowers filmmakers to push the boundaries of technology and innovation in film. It has developed a notable track record, with last year’s Seeing Red registering over a million views on YouTube. This year, MAMI brought together filmmakers Shreela Agarwal, Ritesh Sharma, Robin Joy, and Dhritisree Sarkar. Each of them showed us a distinct cinematic expression using the capabilities of the iPhone 17 Pro Max.

Shreela Agarwal, a national-level boxing gold medalist, returned to filmmaking after suffering a career-ending injury. Her first film was a boxing documentary titled BMCLD, and her newest film, 11.11, is described as a love letter to Mumbai after dark. It is a story of two women on a first date, under city streetlights and on dim beaches. This presented challenging lighting conditions.

“The dynamism and rhythm are only possible because of iPhone,” Agarwal says. “The freedom, simply put, is unmatched.” ProRes RAW data capture allowed her team to push the ISO in post-production, and its wide dynamic range let her team recover details in dark scenes. According to Apple, the iPhone 17 Pro Max allowed her to glide right alongside her actors, and with the camera system’s internal stabilisation, she could even climb giant rocks on the beach with them.

The second film, She Sells Seashells is directed by Ritesh Sharma, who tells a quietly devastating story of a 17-year-old Rajasthani migrant named Maruti. She dreams of entering a beachside restaurant she cannot afford in Goa.

Apple says Sharma used iPhone 17 Pro Max’s Cinematic mode to blur the line between his protagonist’s outer reality and interior dreamscape, shifting focus to guide the audience emotionally. “There are dreamlike sequences where we see Maruti’s internal world,” he explains. “Cinematic mode allows us to shift focus between her reality and what she is feeling.”

The third indie filmmaker, Robin Joy, has served as associate director and dialogue writer on All We Imagine as Light, which was awarded the Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. His new short film, Pathanam (Paradise Fall), tells the story of an angel who collapses in the backyard of an atheist, and the sociopolitical chaos that ensues. For Joy, iPhone 17 Pro Max’s Action mode and vapor cooling chamber were essential to keep the frame stable and the device running smoothly throughout the course of the grueling 9-to-5 shooting schedule, respectively.

Joy’s most aspirational shot is an image of the angel unfolding its wings and returning to the heavens. “We were told it would take three months,” he says. “We had three weeks.” Apple explains that the gap was bridged by AI-powered mask tracking in Adobe Premiere Pro that let Joy edit the prosthetically enhanced character into the scene with the help of Neural Accelerators in the GPU on MacBook Pro.

Last but not least, MAMI Select: Filmed On iPhone’s fourth short film is directed by Dhritisree Sarkar, a PhD scholar specialising in gender and development who made her filmmaking debut during the COVID pandemic on an iPhone 7. Her new film, Kathar Katha, is about a news anchor who is diagnosed with a condition that progressively seals her external orifices.

Kathar Katha’s most striking visual is a close-up of a Bengali bread called luchi puffing up in the character’s eye as a metaphor for suppressed rage. Apple says it was made possible by the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s 8x optical zoom at 200mm. Sarkar recreated the look of celluloid film by shooting in ProRes RAW with Apple Log 2 and pushing contrast and grain to the extreme in post.

You can now watch all four of these short films on MAMI’s YouTube channel.