Japan Hosts Camera Phone Film Festival

Featuring 48 judge-selected short movies, each of them shot using a camera phone, Japan's Pocket Film Festival marks the dawning of a new era in amateur film making. Without special effects or fancy camera-work, the pocket-flicks, like winners "Thumb Girl" and "Walkers," are all close-up and intimate (albeit grainy) windows to the ordinary, the Associated Press reports.

One film professor was impressed with the spontaneity and "intimacy" yielded by the tiny, go-anywhere cameras. But the nascent form is as much the next step in film making as it is the extension of the multi-use cellphone: "Half the world's population owns a cell phone," said another academic. "Art that comes from such numbers holds potential for historic change. " (More film stories.)