The Pocket Films Festival explores the potential for audio-visual expression that lies hidden in a “practical high-tech toy,” and through various media, aims to construct an ideal method of communication that excites our sensibilities – something not yet obvious even to artists.

The young French filmmaker Jean-Charles Fitoussi in a lecture last year at the Graduate School of Film and New Media of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music explained how he has embraced mobile films from his background of traditional filmmaking and his motive for shooting a mobile film of more than one hour long.

“One day I was out driving and I noticed the shadow cast by a group of clouds which were passing across a field, and I thought to myself I just have to film that, but unfortunately I didn’t have a camera with me. Even if I’d rushed off to get hold of a camera, that particular scene would no longer exist. Because you’ve always got a mobile telephone on you, you never need to miss that perfect shot.” How can we even more effectively use the infinite freedom and creative potential of a camera that we have with us all the time? This film festival is the forum for asking that question.

Japan's first attempt at the Pocket Films Festival is based on a partnership between the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and the Forum des images of Paris which has staged numerous audio-visual events including special feature screenings of as many as 1,000 films a year, in addition to organizing the Pocket Films Festival since 2005. Although we are inheriting from them the “esprit” of Paris, the center of the film world, and the format of a film festival where films shot with a mobile phone are screened as works of art, we are also keen to develop a set of plans for our festival that are unique to Japan.