Dibakar Banerjee and Dhritisree Sarkar discuss the new grammar of filmmaking

The room was small. That was the point. Most of Kathar Katha unfolds inside four walls — narrow passages, a tight kitchen, a compact bathroom — because the film is about what four walls do to a woman, and Dhritisree Sarkar needed a camera that could press into those corners without complaint. She used an iPhone 17 Pro Max .

Kathar Katha (The Tale of Katha) was screened recently at the MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone programme (from the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image) in Mumbai, and it left audiences with the slightly unsettled feeling that good cinema always produces: the sense that something true has been said in a way you hadn't quite heard before. Sarkar, a PhD scholar specialising in gender and development who came to filmmaking via economics, is not the most obvious candidate for technological evangelism. But spend 10 minutes with her after a screening and it becomes clear that her interest in the iPhone is not really all about technology. It is about access: to spaces, to performances, to a kind of intimacy that a larger camera might inadvertently foreclose.

She is not alone in that conviction. Steven Soderbergh shot Unsane and High Flying Bird on iPhones. Sean Baker filmed Tangerine, guerrilla-style, on the pavements of Los Angeles with an iPhone 5s and a handful of anamorphic clip-on lenses. What connects these filmmakers, separated by continent, budget, and reputation, is a shared belief that the best camera is the one that gets out of the way and lets the story breathe. The iPhone, increasingly, is that camera.

This year's MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone programme brought together four Indian short filmmakers: Dhritisree Sarkar, Shreela Agarwal, Ritesh Sharma, and Robin Joy. Each was guided by a mentor of considerable standing in Indian cinema: Dibakar Banerjee, Sriram Raghavan, Chaitanya Tamhane, and Geetu Mohandas. The films were shot on iPhone 17 Pro Max, with MacBook Pro with M5 and iPad Pro with M5 pressed into service for additional support. The results, screened across an evening in Mumbai, made a compelling case that the future of Indian independent filmmaking may well be riding in someone's shirt pocket.

Democracy of the lens

Dibakar Banerjee has always been restless with the machinery of filmmaking. The director behind Love Sex Aur Dhokha, Khosla Ka Ghosla and Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, has spent his career pushing against the weight, cost, and ceremony of conventional production. LSD, as the film is known colloquially, was shot entirely on digital at a time when that was still considered a provocation. Since then, Banerjee has kept looking for the next reduction: smaller footprint, leaner kit, greater freedom.

"Even when I was starting out as a filmmaker, I was looking for one thing essentially: I want to make films that were cheaper, so that I can make what I want and retain that freedom," he told us when we met after the screenings. "Right from my first film, I have been trying to reduce the footprint of my cameras, trying to see what can work. LSD was a fully digital film. So I have been trying to get it down to cheaper and cheaper, more survival-oriented filmmaking. To that extent, I think the iPhone gives a lot of hope."

That phrase, survival-oriented filmmaking, is worth mulling over. It is a statement of artistic principle: that the freedom to make the film you want, on your own terms, is worth more than any technical advantage a larger budget might confer. Banerjee sees the iPhone as a tool of liberation. And he is not alone in that view.

Sriram Raghavan, whose 2018 thriller Andhadhun remains one of the most decorated Indian films of the past decade, was equally direct. "Filmmaking today is about vision," he said, "and iPhone makes it possible for anyone with a strong voice to create something meaningful." Coming from a director whose own work is so precisely constructed, that is no throwaway endorsement.

For Dhritisree Sarkar, the appeal of the iPhone is more visceral. It is about what happens in the room when a camera appears. "I have always felt that shooting on iPhone was appealing. I have always felt it is a very democratised process. When there is a big camera, things can become a little intimidating, not only for first-time actors, but for a director as well," she said after the screening. There is something in that observation worth dwelling on. The big camera, for all its technical superiority, carries a certain authority and weight of expectation that can freeze a performance in its tracks. The iPhone, sitting quietly in a palm, asks less of everyone in the room, and sometimes that asking less is precisely what allows more to happen.

Sarkar is no stranger to this alchemy. During the Covid pandemic, she used an iPhone 7 to make her short film Chhaddonam (Pen Name), which was subsequently acquired by MUBI. Kathar Katha is the natural continuation of that instinct: the story expanded, the technique refined, the hardware considerably more sophisticated.

A woman's voice, a small room

Kathar Katha explores a rare and troubling condition, one that progressively seals all the orifices of a promising television journalist whose livelihood, whose very identity, is built on being seen and heard. She loved singing. Slowly, that is taken from her too.

The domestic interior becomes a landscape of enclosure: narrow passage, small kitchen, bathroom. "I wanted to explore the relationship between women and the concept of four walls. We go outside only once, and that too at the point when the film is reaching its crescendo," Sarkar explained. The iPhone, which can press into a corner without complaint, be handheld through a tight corridor or mounted on a track in a room barely wide enough for two people to pass, is the ideal instrument for that kind of claustrophobic intimacy.

"My DoP had previously worked on iPhone, so he had a rough idea of how to go about it. During the shoot, it was really easy for us. At times we were mounting it on a tripod, at other times on a track, and sometimes handheld. We moved through it quite quickly," she said. The visual grammar of the film was carefully considered. Sarkar told her director of photography that the space had to feel surreal and genuinely cinematic. "He used an anamorphic lens and the Cinematic mode on the iPhone. When we looked at the monitor, we could not believe our eyes. The magic of the iPhone," she said.

During the prosthetic trials, sequences in which the character's eyes and mouth are sealed shut, the team used the Blackmagic Camera app with Tentacle Sync to convert an iPad Pro into a monitor. The close-ups, Sarkar said, were the first surprise. The technology held.

The second surprise came in post-production. Sarkar and her editor worked through the night, until two in the morning as she tells it, with a MacBook Pro handling a substantial volume of raw footage. "There was a tremendous amount of raw footage, but the MacBook Pro handled it with ease. Not a single glitch. The M5 chip has been tremendously helpful," she said. There is something almost domestic in that image: two people at a laptop in the small hours, sorting through the raw material of a film about silence creeping in. The machine did not complain.

It was Apple Log 2 that gave the colour graders their greatest latitude. "It helped us handle highlights and shadows extremely well in post-production, and the same applies to over-exposed windows. This is a psychological drama, so shadows play an important role. We could control everything and colour-grade however we wanted," Sarkar noted. "We lit the full room so that, again in post-production, we could bring that light down, thanks to Apple Log 2. We could control the extra light in post-production and deliver the sense of drama you are describing."

Apple Log 2 is one of several professional-grade features on the iPhone 17 Pro Max that have made filmmakers take notice. ProRes RAW and genlock are among the others, and together they shift the device decisively into territory that once required far more cumbersome and costly equipment. Sarkar also made full use of the 8x optical zoom at 200mm, using it in one particularly striking moment to capture the reflection of a luchi puffing up in Katha's eyeball, a tiny swelling of heat and bread that she reads as an image of the character's growing rage. That is the kind of micro-observation that only a filmmaker who is simultaneously a social scientist would think to make, and only a camera with that reach, in that small a body, could practically achieve on the fly.

Banerjee, who mentored Sarkar through the process, was moved by her script from the outset. "I was pretty moved and, in a way, shaken up by her script, in a way that I really liked. I liked the spaces it was trying to move through. I also liked the way Dhriti was layering everything. It was not something you go back and forth on endlessly; it looped around but remained quite tightly packed," he said. "And I think all of us have mothers, sisters, partners, wives, and relatives whom we have seen lose their voice, lose themselves, lose their expression. This script brought all of that back to me very powerfully. That is why I came on board."

Anush Venkatesan, senior director, iPhone product marketing at Apple, later spoke to us over a video call. He said: "The industry is constantly changing, constantly evolving. Our goal is to keep pace with understanding how that is happening across the various landscapes of creative output. For us, it starts with taking a deep look at what is actually happening in the workflow — what people are trying to create and what the final product looks like. A lot of our engineering teams here are filmmakers and creatives themselves, so there is an empathy that comes with asking: what did I need? What was my experience? And then trying to build from that. The goal is really to treat filmmakers as we treat all our users — if we can understand their needs and the problems they are trying to solve, whether it involves iPhone or some other product, we want to take stock of that, investigate, research, and then drive changes that are genuinely going to improve how they create."

It's all about stories

The other three films screened that afternoon were strikingly distinct, in geography, in tone, in what they asked of the technology, and together they made the point that the iPhone's versatility is inseparable from its democratic reach.

Shreela Agarwal had, for a time, set cinema entirely aside. She had gone instead to chase a different kind of dream: boxing. She competed at the national level and won gold. Then came a career-ending injury, and filmmaking, the earlier love, returned to fill the space. Her newest film 11.11, which she describes as "a love letter to Mumbai after dark", follows two women on a first date. It is a film about the city at night, about possibility and nervousness, and it required Agarwal to move, to glide really, alongside her actors through Mumbai's nocturnal geography. The iPhone 17 Pro Max's internal stabilisation made that possible. She could move freely with her characters, could climb giant rocks on a beach without the footage becoming a lurching mess. The camera moved as her body moved, and the edit benefited accordingly.

Ritesh Sharma brought a very different sensibility. Raised in Varanasi and shaped by years as a street theatre performer, that most immediate and unmediated form of storytelling, he came to filmmaking with an acute ear and an instinct for the social. His film She Sells Seashells follows Maruti, a 17-year-old Rajasthani migrant who sells trinkets on the beach in Goa and dreams of stepping inside an upmarket seaside restaurant that exists, quite literally, on the other side of a threshold she is not supposed to cross. It is a film about aspiration and exclusion, told with the precision of someone who has always understood that a stage is a political space.

For Sharma, the iPhone's Audio Mix feature was essential. It allowed him to zero in on the precise sounds he needed: Maruti's voice, the particular texture of the beach, the muffled glamour of the restaurant interior. Wind and background noise were culled; what remained was a precisely shaped aural world. Sound, in his hands, became a tool for drawing the audience deeper into his protagonist's interior life.

Robin Joy brought the programme to Kerala, and to the cosmos. Joy traced his filmmaking career back to a local theatre collective, and more recently served as associate director and dialogue writer on All We Imagine as Light, Payal Kapadia's film that won the Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. His MAMI Select short, Pathanam (Paradise Fall), is an altogether stranger proposition. An angel collapses in the backyard of an atheist, and the sociopolitical chaos that follows is worth a watch.

For Joy, the iPhone's engineering mattered as much as its portability. The vapour chamber in the iPhone 17 Pro Max, a thermal management system that keeps the device from overheating under sustained use, kept the phone running smoothly through a gruelling nine-to-five shooting schedule. Inspiration is all very well, but a camera that throttles under pressure is a liability on set. The iPhone 17 Pro Max, it seems, did not throttle.

Technology that's easy to use

What came through most clearly in Anush Venkatesan remarks was not the specification sheet, impressive as that is, but the underlying philosophy. "It is definitely a journey that has been going on for years, to continue driving innovation in our products. But all of that comes from a place of wanting to deliver something that democratises filmmaking and delivers on what filmmakers need. The whole point is to use it as a tool for those moments when inspiration strikes," he said.

The 48-megapixel telephoto camera is, by any measure, a remarkable piece of engineering. Its next-generation tetraprism delivers improved sharpness in bright light and considerably more detail in low light, particularly useful for the psychologically charged, shadow-heavy interiors that Sarkar was working in. For video, the stabilisation has been taken further still with an Action Mode that eliminates the need for a gimbal and the post-production headaches that a jumpy gimbal inevitably generates. "The more you can accomplish right there as you are capturing the shot," Venkatesan noted, "the better it is for the filmmaker".

Camera Control, the physical button that gives tactile access to the camera's functions, has also been widely adopted. Venkatesan described it as "an acknowledgement that the camera is such an integral part of the iPhone experience for everyone", and noted strong uptake among filmmakers using the swipe and press gestures in creative ways. It is one of those details that matters more than it might initially appear. The difference between reaching for a menu on a touchscreen and using a dedicated tool, when you are moving fast and the light is changing, is often the difference between getting the shot and missing it entirely.

Apple has also launched Apple Creator Studio, a subscription service that bundles a range of premium productivity tools, writing, filming, photography, editing, design, and marketing, into a single offering aimed squarely at multidisciplinary creatives. Launched in January, it is a logical extension of the broader project: if the iPhone is the capture device, the ecosystem around it ought to support every other part of the creative process. "The goal for Apple Creator Studio was to address all of those needs in one place," Venkatesan said.

Looking further ahead, the LiDAR sensor, already present in the Pro models of the iPhone, opens up possibilities that filmmakers are only beginning to explore. A Mexican short from last year, El lazo de Petra, blended live action and pixel art, using LiDAR-generated 3D motion capture to achieve a retro gaming aesthetic. It was a film that could not have existed without that technology, deployed in a context, a short film, an independent production, where it would previously have been entirely out of reach.

For Banerjee, all of this points towards a question about education and about what film schools teach and what they ought to be willing to unsettle. "I believe that education should happen, and I equally believe that anti-education should at the same time prosper. A good society works when you have some degree of classical, conventional education existing in parallel with the rebellion against, and the unsettling of, that very system," he said. It is a generous formulation: not a rejection of craft, but an insistence that craft must always be answerable to imagination, and imagination must always be free to find its own tools.

Sarkar, for her part, is unanxious about what comes next. She has no interest in drawing battle lines between the iPhone and the full-format camera. "There will certainly be times when I need to use a full-format camera, but I see no reason why the two cannot coexist," she said. That coexistence, pragmatic and trained on the story rather than the equipment, may be precisely the disposition the next generation of Indian independent filmmakers will need.

Venkatesan, when asked what he ultimately wants the iPhone camera to be, set the specification sheet aside entirely. "The most inspiring and exciting thing we are seeing is more and more people turning to iPhone for filmmaking. As long as we remain focused on understanding, empathising, and building for those goals, I do not have one specific thing I want the camera to do. We just want it to make people happy. We want it to give light and access to more young filmmakers, and to keep delivering on truly remarkable projects." It is an honest closing note that a piece about democratised filmmaking could ask for.