The world’s first cell phone camera film festival is currently being held in Yokohama.
The Pocket Films Festival features submissions by people who recorded films on ther camera-equipped cellphones.
The works, streaming on monitors of cell phones strapped to tables, are filled with everyday shots, some literally taken on the run with streets and cars whizzing past in a blur.
They have a voyeuristic feel because the cell phone is so unobtrusive. Devoid of the typical grandeur of standard films, they offer grainy but patiently taken close-ups that don’t rely on zooms and other fancy editing techniques.
The Pocket Films Festival in Japan, which organizers say is the first in this nation, marks yet another use for the omnipresent portable phone here, already used to exchange e-mail, surf the Internet, read novels and navigate on miniature digital maps.
