In telling the stories of a clandestine affair on the streets of Mumbai, divinity and humanity in Kerala, a young misfit navigating Goa’s vibrant beaches, and a Bengali woman terrified of losing her voice, the emerging auteurs included in this year’s MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone program from the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI) harnessed iPhone 17 Pro Max to construct short films with distinct cinematic languages.

“Filmmaking today is about vision, and iPhone makes it possible for anyone with a strong voice to create something meaningful,” says writer-director Sriram Raghavan, whose 2018 feature, Andhadhun, is one of the most decorated Indian films of the past decade.

Raghavan served as a mentor for this year’s program, alongside fellow industry luminaries Chaitanya Tamhane, Dibakar Banerjee, and Geetu Mohandas — winners of accolades from India’s National Film Awards, the Asian Film Awards, the Venice International Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival, to name a few. To make their shorts, filmmakers Shreela Agarwal, Ritesh Sharma, Robin Joy, and Dhritisree Sarkar tapped into the pro camera system, cinema-grade video capabilities, and advanced features of iPhone 17 Pro Max, as well as MacBook Pro with M5 and iPad Pro with M5 for additional support. Watch the four short films on MAMI’s YouTube channel.

“The possibilities iPhone opens up — in terms of choreography, movement, and ease of access — are redefining the art form,” says Tamhane, whose features Court (2014) and The Disciple (2020) earned recognition at the Venice Film Festival. “It helps push the idea of what a film can be.”

With last year’s Seeing Red crossing a million views on YouTube and Kovarty winning Best Short Film at the Bengaluru International Short Film Festival, MAMI Mumbai Film Festival director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur believes the program is having a ripple effect. “The fact that these films have been captured with iPhone has inspired hundreds of people to go out there and start making short films,” he says. “It’s creating a new generation of filmmakers.”

Now in its third year, MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone showcases how new tools are changing not just the way films are made, but which stories get told. Take a peek behind the scenes at the making of this year’s shorts.

While her peers stepped away from other disciplines to pursue filmmaking, Shreela Agarwal did something stranger. She stepped away from filmmaking itself. A graduate of Singapore’s Lasalle College of the Arts, Agarwal put cinema aside to chase her dream of becoming a boxer. She competed at the national level and won bronze.

At the time, it might have felt like a picture-perfect moment — but it turned out to be the end of her second act. “Two years ago, I suffered a career-ending injury,” Agarwal explains. “And then film pulled me right back in.”

After a friend tipped her off about the MAMI Dimensions Mumbai program, Agarwal’s competitive nature was stoked once more. Fittingly, her first film back was a boxing documentary titled BMCLD. This time, she won gold.

Her newest film, 11.11 — “a love letter to Mumbai after dark” — tells the story of two women on a first date. In the script, her protagonists walk and dance under city streetlights and on dim beaches, presenting challenging lighting conditions.

“We tested iPhone 17 Pro Max in a very unique way,” says Agarwal. ProRes RAW data capture allowed her team to push the ISO in post-production. The high-performance codec has a wider colour gamut with minimal upfront processing. Its wider dynamic range let her team recover details in dark scenes, leading to a significantly brighter and crisper image in comparison to what the naked eye saw on set. Adjusting the tint and white balance also allowed them to homogenize the colors of streetlamps and retain a natural look.

For aspiring filmmakers, the benefits of filming on iPhone aren’t just aesthetic — they’re also practical, Agarwal explains: “You don’t need those massive lights that independent filmmakers could never really afford anyway.”

Inspired by Tanztheater — an expressionistic blend of dance and theatre championed by German choreographer Pina Bausch — with 11.11, Agarwal needed access to a full range of camera motion. iPhone 17 Pro Max allowed her to glide right alongside her actors, and with the camera system’s internal stabilization, she could even climb giant rocks on the beach with them.

“The dynamism and rhythm are only possible because of iPhone,” Agarwal says. “The freedom, simply put, is unmatched.”

Growing up in Varanasi — one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities — Ritesh Sharma was immersed in a rich tradition of storytelling. He credits his origins as a street theatre performer for paving the way for his pivot to filmmaking: “As an actor, I realised early on the power of directing the audience.”

Sharma — whose Jhini Bini Chadariya (The Brittle Thread) won Best Debut Film at the New York Indian Film Festival in 2021 — describes his storytelling style as an exploration of the space between truth and fiction. His MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone entry, She Sells Seashells, follows Maruti, a 17-year-old Rajasthani migrant who sells trinkets on the beach, and her dream of stepping inside an upmarket seaside restaurant in Goa — a seemingly trivial act that becomes a study in dignity in the director’s capable hands.

iPhone 17 Pro Max allowed Sharma to draw the audience deeper into his protagonist’s mental state. “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.”

Whether he’s filming amid the crashing waves of the Arabian Sea or capturing the chaos of Goa’s carnival, sound design is vital for Sharma. The Audio Mix feature on iPhone 17 Pro Max lets him zero in on the sounds he needs, culling wind and background noise to create a precise aural milieu.

“I felt like a moving studio,” he says. “During preproduction, I’d record whatever I was hearing with the native mics on iPhone, transfer the file, and edit it right away on MacBook Pro.” On set and during post-production, his team also used Sidecar to convert iPad Pro into a second monitor to review the edit.

Sharma believes iPhone doesn’t just change how cinema is filmed, but also how it’s consumed. “If you’re watching content on iPhone, like a lot of regular people might do on their daily commute, it fills your vision — just like in a theater,” he smiles.

Robin Joy traces his career as a filmmaker back to his local theater collective in Kerala. “Watching the films of Werner Herzog and Giuseppe Tornatore, I realized it’s OK to be a little weird in telling stories,” laughs the Film and Television Institute of India graduate, who 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.

Joy’s MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone short, Pathanam (Paradise Fall), tells the story of an angel who collapses in the backyard of an atheist — and the sociopolitical chaos that ensues.

“I’d been wanting to make this film for a few years, but it felt too ambitious,” explains Joy, referring to the project’s outdoor sets and action sequences. “iPhone 17 Pro Max changed the way we’re approaching it. I can just lock and go.”

The vapor chamber in iPhone 17 Pro Max kept the device running smoothly throughout the course of the grueling 9-to-5 shooting schedule. Action mode kept the frame stable, even as the team was thrown about on a small boat in the middle of a lake. And MacBook Pro kept up with the crew through long days on set and even longer days in post-production. An ambitious plan to edit heavy timelines in 4K, rather than making smaller proxies, was vindicated by the power-efficient performance of M5.

Joy’s most aspirational shot — an image of the angel unfolding its wings and returning to the heavens — arrives late in the film. “We were told it would take three months,” he says. “We had three weeks.”

That gap was bridged by AI-powered mask tracking in Adobe Premiere Pro that let Joy seamlessly edit the prosthetically enhanced character into the scene. Thanks to Neural Accelerators in the GPU on MacBook Pro, object masking runs locally on device with dramatically faster AI performance and tracking.

For Joy, the technology meant that filming the challenging Pathanam wasn’t an act of hubris, but a calculated leap of faith: “Being able to capture cinematic stories with iPhone — which is accessible on a daily basis, rather than a camera you rent out once in a while — lets newer filmmakers explore so many more possibilities.”

A Ph.D. scholar specializing in gender and development, Dhritisree Sarkar found her way to filmmaking from economics. “Instead of a thesis about day-to-day human behavior, I’m telling the same story in a different format,” she says.

Shot on iPhone 7 during the height of the COVID pandemic, her first short film, Chhaddonam (Pen Name), went on to be acquired by MUBI. “Accessibility is important for a beginner,” she says. “You can just pick up your phone and shoot whatever story you want to tell.”

Her new film, Kathar Katha (The Tale of Katha), tells the story of a news anchor who has been diagnosed with a rare condition that progressively seals all of her external orifices — a premise that emerged from a personal moment. Sarkar recalls standing before a mirror when an unexpected thought surfaced: Had she been silent for so long that her mouth was closing?

During trials where prosthetics sealed the eyes and mouth of her actor, Sarkar’s team used the Blackmagic Camera app with Tentacle Sync to transform iPad Pro into a monitor. A hush fell over the crew as they reviewed the performance in close-ups. “The actor went through such an emotional journey when she was deprived of her senses,” Sarkar recalls. “When I saw the footage, I was confident that the audience would feel it too.”

Ever the economist, Sarkar views the micro world through the macro lens. She pushes in close with iPhone to capture the reflection of a luchi, a Bengali bread, puffing up in Katha’s eyeball as an expression of her growing rage. The 8x optical zoom at 200 mm on iPhone 17 Pro Max was also pivotal to depicting the character’s emotion, Sarkar says: “The trauma isn’t on the outside. It lies within.”

The film’s visual grammar references a generation of women, including Sarkar’s grandmother, who never left the houses they lived in, except at the end of their lives. To evoke that earlier era, Sarkar and her cinematographer created a celluloid look by capturing maximum latitude with ProRes RAW and Apple Log 2, and then pushing the image’s contrast and grain to their limits in post.

Sarkar credits technology like iPhone for democratising the medium and making room for new narratives. “I felt like I have a story to tell, and I have iPhone,” she says. “When no one else will tell my story, why shouldn’t I?”

All four shorts are now available on MAMI’s YouTube channel.