When my function documentary Motherboard used to be launched, I used to be in my past due 50s. I had filmed it over twenty years, on 5 generations of smartphones, documenting the ache, pleasure and comedy of elevating my son Jim by myself.
After I changed into pregnant at 38, I discovered myself unmarried and broke. I used to be running lengthy hours as a contract TV and movie director. Jim’s father made it transparent he didn’t need to be concerned. I didn’t need my son to have two absent folks, so I hand over my activity in a single day. Like many ladies within the inventive industries, I paid a heavy motherhood penalty. It used to be greater than 12 years ahead of I were given again to creating motion pictures.
For 5 years I attempted to lift finance for Motherboard via the standard markets. I ultimately raised £60,000 from Ecu TV channel Arte to start out modifying Motherboard, simplest to lose it once we may no longer in finding fit investment. The movie that modified the entirety for me used to be Tangerine, which used to be famously shot on an iPhone 5 in 2014. Its power and immediacy blew me away.
Round the similar time, I got here throughout an interview with director Ava DuVernay, the primary black lady to win the most productive director prize for her movie Center of Nowhere on the Sundance Movie Pageant in 2012. Her recommendation to fellow filmmakers used to be to forestall looking ahead to the precise agent, financier or manufacturer to “discover” you. “There’s no one coming … You have to do it yourself.”
The trailer for my movie, Motherboard.
And so my DIY filmmaking profession started. I sought after to make a movie about solo parenting in all its messiness, the highs, but in addition the lows. I started taking pictures with my smartphone, nearly day by day, for just about 20 years.
Jim grew up on digicam. I filmed his first day in class and his remaining day at school. I filmed days out, dance-offs and bedtime routines. I filmed the tricky stuff too: the day I used to be recognized with breast most cancers, Jim’s response to assembly his dad for the primary time at 14 and the rollercoaster teenager years that adopted. The smartphone made that get entry to conceivable. Jim preferred its spontaneity and low-fi intimacy; every so often he filmed me on his telephone too.
Now I’m growing my 2nd function, an autobiographical documentary about navigating circle of relatives, friendship and relationships in my 60s. I latterly learn that field workplace hits are 4 occasions much more likely to superstar a speaking animal than a girl over 60. I can stay filming with my smartphone and make it anyway.
With my smartphone, I used to be in a position to make an apology, relatively than permission.
Writer supplied (no reuse)
Over the past 15 years, as a filmmaker and professor of virtual arts, I’ve noticed strange shorts and lines made on smartphones. Many had been created by means of early profession filmmakers who would have struggled to get entry to business investment and not using a smartphone and a minimum workforce.
This issues as a result of movie finance nonetheless stays laborious to lift if you happen to aren’t from the white, middle-class, male demographic the business has a tendency to favour. In the United Kingdom and Eire, simplest 16% of the 718 motion pictures launched theatrically in 2025 had been directed or co-directed by means of girls or non-binary filmmakers.
This July, I’ve co-curated SMART, a one-day Smartphone filmmaking pageant at Finsbury Park Picturehouse. The pageant will have fun filmmakers who’ve pioneered this fashion of running and were given their motion pictures around the end line regardless of the percentages. I can even be screening Motherboard, adopted by means of an target audience Q&A with my son Jim and me.
The programme levels from no-budget DIY shorts to the world over acclaimed options. It contains Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Passed Woman (2025), co-written and edited by means of Tangerine director Sean Baker – who received an Oscar for his movie Anora in 2025 – and shot Tangerine on an iPhone with a small, agile workforce.
Tsou has been generating motion pictures with Baker for 25 years, however Left-Passed Woman is the primary function she has directed and co-written. After I interviewed her just lately, she stated how lengthy it had taken to get the movie financed: “I had the idea in, like, early 2000. So that’s how crazy this whole journey is.”
The trailer for Left-Passed Woman.
Tsou is attracted to the liberty smartphones give filmmakers, however what actually pursuits her is their get entry to and intimacy. When she first regarded as surroundings her movie in a Taipei night time marketplace, Taiwanese manufacturers instructed her it could be unimaginable to shoot there for actual. “They all said you need to build your night market. You have to hire all the extras,” she instructed me. “I’m like, no, that’s not how I’m going to do it.”
As an alternative, she shot on location with the iPhone 13 she nonetheless carries these days. In the beginning the 20 individual workforce and rig used to be too huge, attracting crowds who stopped to observe. Best after lowering the workforce dimension even additional may Tsou effectively seize kid actor Nina Ye operating during the retail outlets and kiosks of the night time marketplace as on a regular basis lifestyles persevered round her.
Left-Passed Woman fantastically captures a kid’s perspective, one thing Tsou believes got here from the smartphone’s agility. “iPhone captures ProRes 4K image, just like any professional camera, but it’s very small. It’s very mobile. So we can get so close to her. We can stay at her level.”
A number of of the filmmakers appearing shorts at SMART as a part of the filmmaker panel dialogue, are at first in their careers. Tsou’s recommendation to them used to be easy, be informed multiple ability. “You need to be able to write your own story and try to shoot your own story. And try to edit your own story. If you have these three basic skills, you don’t need anything. You don’t need money.”
No finances, then, is now not an excuse. Smartphone filmmaking is not going to repair the inequalities of the movie business. Nevertheless it does give extra filmmakers a direction round them and an opportunity to make the paintings the business has too regularly did not give a boost to.
