Source: The Conversation – UK
When my feature documentary Motherboard was released, I was in my late 50s. I had filmed it over 20 years, on five generations of smartphones, documenting the pain, joy and comedy of raising my son Jim alone.
When I became pregnant at 38, I found myself single and broke. I was working long hours as a freelance TV and film director. Jim’s father made it clear he did not want to be involved.
I didn’t want my son to have two absent parents, so I quit my job overnight. Like many women in the creative industries, I paid a heavy motherhood penalty. It was more than 12 years before I got back to making films.
For five years I tried to raise finance for Motherboard through the usual markets. I eventually raised £60,000 from Arte, the Association for European Television, to begin editing Motherboard, only to lose it when we could not find match funding.
The film that changed everything for me was Tangerine, which was famously shot on an iPhone 5 in 2014. Its energy and immediacy blew me away.
Around the same time, I came across an interview with director Ava DuVernay, the first black woman to win the best director prize for her film Middle of Nowhere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012.
Her advice to fellow filmmakers was to stop waiting for the right agent, financier or producer to “discover” you. “There’s no one coming … You have to do it yourself.” The trailer for my film, Motherboard.
And so my DIY filmmaking career began. I wanted to make a film about solo parenting in all its messiness, the highs, but also the lows. I began shooting with my smartphone, almost daily, for nearly two decades.
Jim grew up on camera. I filmed his first day at school and his last day at college. I filmed days out, dance-offs and bedtime routines. I filmed the difficult stuff too: the day I was diagnosed with breast cancer, Jim’s reaction to meeting his dad for the first time at 14 and the rollercoaster teen years that followed.
The smartphone made that access possible. Jim liked its spontaneity and low-fi intimacy; sometimes he filmed me on his phone too.
With my smartphone, I was able to embrace director Werner Herzog’s advice to filmmakers: “Ask for forgiveness, rather than permission.” I could film on buses, trains and in hospitals without months of emails trying to secure access.
During chemotherapy and radiotherapy, filming on a phone wasn’t intimidating and no one ever said “no”. Sometimes nurses even helped me shoot, pressing record as I disappeared into another CT scan. Now I’m developing my second feature, an autobiographical documentary about navigating family, friendship and relationships in my 60s.
I recently read that box office hits are four times more likely to star a talking animal than a woman over 60. I will keep filming with my smartphone and make it anyway. Over the last 15 years, as a filmmaker and professor of digital arts, I have seen extraordinary shorts and features made on smartphones.
Many were created by early career filmmakers who would have struggled to access industry funding without a smartphone and a minimal crew. This matters because film finance still remains hard to raise if you are not from the white, middle-class, male demographic the industry tends to favour.
In the UK and Ireland, only 16% of the 718 films released theatrically in 2025 were directed or co-directed by women or non-binary filmmakers. This July, I’ve co-curated SMART, a one-day Smartphone filmmaking festival at Finsbury Park Picturehouse.
The festival will celebrate filmmakers who have pioneered this way of working and got their films across the finish line despite the odds. I will also be screening Motherboard, followed by an audience Q&A with my son Jim and me.
The programme ranges from no-budget DIY shorts to internationally acclaimed features.
It includes Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl (2025), co-written and edited by Tangerine director Sean Baker – who won an Oscar for his film Anora in 2025 – and shot Tangerine on an iPhone with a small, agile crew.
Tsou has been producing films with Baker for 25 years, but Left-Handed Girl is the first feature she has directed and co-written. When I interviewed her recently, she acknowledged how long it had taken to get the film financed: “I had the idea in, like, early 2000.
So that’s how crazy this whole journey is.” The trailer for Left-Handed Girl. Tsou is drawn to the freedom smartphones give filmmakers, but what really interests her is their access and intimacy. When she first considered setting her film in a Taipei night market, Taiwanese producers told her it would be impossible to shoot there for real.
“They all said you need to build your night market. You have to hire all the extras,” she told me. “I’m like, no, that’s not how I’m going to do it.” Instead, she shot on location with the iPhone 13 she still carries today.
At first the 20 person crew and rig was too large, attracting crowds who stopped to watch. Only after reducing the crew size even further could Tsou successfully capture child actor Nina Ye running through the shops and kiosks of the night market as everyday life continued around her.
Left-Handed Girl beautifully captures a child’s point of view, something Tsou believes came 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.” Several of the filmmakers showing shorts at SMART as part of the filmmaker panel discussion, are at the start of their careers.
Tsou’s advice to them was simple, learn more than one skill. “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 budget, then, is no longer an excuse. Smartphone filmmaking will not fix the inequalities of the film industry.
But it does give more filmmakers a route around them and a chance to make the work the industry has too often failed to support.
Victoria Mapplebeck does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/02/smartphones-are-helping-filmmakers-tell-the-stories-the-movie-industry-overlooks/