Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max.
Credit: DH Photo/KVN Rohit
Annual Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI) kicked off on Wednesday (April 16) in Mumbai, home of India's Hindi film industry Bollywood.
As part of 'Jio MAMI Select – Filmed on iPhone' programme 2025, four talented filmmakers-- Amrita Bagchi, Rohin Raveendran Nair, Chanakya Vyas, and Shalini Vijayakumar were selected to showcase their creativity.
They were mentored by movie industry veterans, including actor and director Konkona Sensharma, Malayalam filmmaker Lijo Jose Pellissery, director-producer Vikramaditya Motwane and Tamil filmmaker Vetri Maaran.
“With iPhone, there’s so much power contained in such a compact package that you can bypass the conventions of mainstream filmmaking. All you need is a great idea and the guts and determination to follow through with it,” said Konkona Sensharma.
It should be noted, two teams of last year’s participating films recently won Critics Choice awards for Best Short Film, Best Director (Short Film), and Best Writing (Short Film).
Amrita Bagchi's short movie Tinctoria, is a psychological thriller, which is said to be inspired by actual historical events. It tells the story of a modern-day fashion mogul whose ancestral legacy is built on the skeletons of indigo farmers from the colonial era — the ghosts of whom quite literally come back to haunt the protaganist.
To get the immersive, claustrophobic atmosphere of a thrill, Bagchi made good use of the iPhone 16 Pro Max's cinematic mode.
Amrita Bagchi (pictured) believes her film could never have been shot with a traditional camera. “With iPhone 16 Pro Max, I can constantly create and improvise,” Bagchi said.
“We’re tracking bubbles and plastic sheets flying through the air, and the depth of the field is so clean. Just like it’s shot on a huge, high-budget cinematic camera,” Bagchi said.
Rohin Raveendran Nair is a director, writer, and cinematographer whose credits include Netflix shows like Sacred Games and Black Warrant.
For the MAMI programme, Nair shot a short film, Kovarty, which takes him back to his roots, deep in Kerala's Alleppey backwaters.
Rohin Raveendran Nair (right), on set with cinematographer Swapnil S. Sonawane (left), frames a POV shot from inside of a typewriter using iPhone 16 Pro Max while filming Kovarty.
Credit: Apple
Kovarty is cute love story, which showcases the relationship between a typewriter and typist. Qwerty, as the typewriter is christened, is slowly transformed by the lilting Keralite accent into Kovarty. This acts as a metaphor for the film’s major theme: change, said Nair.
“Using iPhone’s small form factor, I could place the camera inside the typewriter and capture its POV. This, along with practical effects with fish wires, helps bring the device to life,” Nair noted.
Chanakya Vyas' short movie Mangya is a coming-of-age tale about an 11-year-old boy and his pet, the titular rooster. The story is inspired by an article on the avian flu outbreak in suburban Mumbai and during the same period, he suffered devastating loss of his golden retriever.
Filmmaker Chanakya Vyas (right) and cinematographer Amith Surendran (left) use Action mode to capture multiple takes in a narrow window of time on the set of Mangya.
Credit: Apple
For a key scene in the movie, Vyas was tracking his actor for 300 metres just before the break of dawn.
“There’s no time to mount the camera on a traditional gimbal. But with Action mode, I could even shoot multiple takes. The stabilisation is just so impressive,” Vyas said.
“We’re able to layer footsteps, the rooster crowing, and the whirring sound of a fan with distinct clarity with the studio-quality mics on iPhone 16 Pro Max. “The native audio is that good in its bit rate and cadence, ” he noted.
Vyas reviewing the sound mix he captured with the iPhone 16 Pro Max on his MacBook Pro.
Credit: Apple
Shalini Vijayakumar's Seeing Red, is a comedic horror film about the quashed emotions of the women in a large Tamil household.
Tamil Nadu-based director made good use of slow motion video recording of the iPhone 16 Pro Max. The movie, which begins with three women screaming in horror after seeing a ghost. It ends with them screaming to express a collective, repressed rage.
To depict the scream, Vijayakumar inverted the iPhone 16 Pro Max to all possible angles. “I call these the ‘mass shots’ where the heroes walk dramatically in slow motion,” she says. “I’m doing that for the women in 4K at 120 fps, and it looks fabulous.”
Filmmaker Shalini Vijayakumar (center) and cinematographer Vighneshwar (background left) review footage on the set of Seeing Red, Vijayakumar’s short film for MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone.
Credit: Apple
For more tightly framed shots, the 120 mm lens on iPhone 16 Pro Max allowed her to bring together her narrative, milieux, staging, and theme in a single shot that she composed using Procreate on iPad.
For editing, all four creators used the latest Apple MacBook Pro with M4 series silicon.
The top-end M4 Max chipset houses a 16-core CPU and up to a 40-core GPU. It supports more than half a terabyte per second of unified memory bandwidth and a Neural Engine that is over 3x faster than M1 Max, allowing on-device AI models to run faster than ever.
With the M4 Max, the MacBook Pro delivers up to 3.5x the performance of the M1 Max. It can support heavy creative workloads like adding visual effects and 3D animation development.
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