London’s Finsbury Park Picturehouse will host a July 11 one-day celebration of the creative impact of Smartphone Filmmaking – from no-budget DIY shorts to internationally acclaimed feature films.
The day includes screenings, filmmaker conversations and industry panels featuring Victoria Mapplebeck’s award-winning feature documentary Motherboard, filmed over 20 years on five generations of smartphones, and Shih-Ching Tsou’s acclaimed feature Left-Handed Girl(edited by Sean Baker). Other examples include Bradley Banton’s Instagram Live-inspired drama More Life.
The event is co-organised by filmmaker Mapplebeck* and Adam Gee*, Head of Documentary Campus Masterschool.
“SMart celebrates the extraordinary creative freedom that smartphone filmmaking offers. It lowers barriers, opens up cinema to new voices, and allows filmmakers to work with an intimacy and immediacy that traditional production often can’t match. For me, making Motherboard over 20 years on five generations of smartphones showed how powerful this technology can be — not just as a camera, but as a way of telling deeply personal stories,” says Mapplebeck.
Adam Gee adds: “Why I’m so fired up by smartphone filmmaking, beyond the dynamism and inventiveness, are the things it enables you to shoot which would be way harder or even impossible any other way.”
The screening of Left-Handed Girl will be followed by a videoed Q&A with director Shih-Ching Tsou. Following the screening of smartphone documentary Motherboard, BAFTA-winning filmmaker Mapplebeck and subject of the film, Jim Mapplebeck, with do a live Q&A hosted by writer and broadcaster Janet Ellis.
The programme also features a smartphone filmmaker panel with clips, chaired by Adam Gee, with Bradley Banton, Tuwaine Barrett, Victoria Mapplebeck, Trim Lamba, Aamana Khan and Anna Novikova. “This one-day event is a celebration of how mobile technology is reshaping contemporary cinema and audio-visual culture, and opening up new ways to shoot, tell stories and reach audiences,” Gee underlines.
Mapplebeck is internationally recognised as a pioneer of smartphone filmmaking, having worked exclusively with mobile technologies for over a decade. Her BAFTA-winning short Missed Call and her feature documentary Motherboard were filmed entirely on smartphones, the latter released theatrically in 2025 to critical and awards acclaim. Victoria is Professor of Digital Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.
BAFTA-winning digital creator Adam Gee, brings senior commissioning and innovation experience from Channel 4, Little Dot Studios and CAA, alongside curatorial work across digital storytelling and emerging media. He is currently Head of Documentary Campus Masterschool in Berlin.
