The full length “phone” movie “Nocturnes pour le Roi de Rome”, directed by the French director Jean-Charles Fitoussi will be presented this week at the Cannes Fim Festival, in the “New Technologies” section.

Since their apparition on the market less than three years ago, 300 million videophones have been sold. Besides the memories they can immortalize, these new tools have quickly become the omnipresent witnesses of various catastrophes over the globe.

The spontaneity and the feeling of authenticity of the images obtained give them, certain would say, a greater credibility. This notably contributes to the success of the new brainless trend “happy slapping” (thank you Jackass!), now counterbalanced with the flourishing of posh “arty” pocket films.

A greater number of film festivals dedicated to the genre are appearing to celebrate this kind of creative re-appropriation of the videophone technology. From San Franciso to Berlin, an underground scene is taking life: micromovies, minimovies, microcinema, mobile devices or mobile visuals.

Accessible to both experienced and less experienced artists, the Pocket Film Festival in Paris is one the first to celebrate this medium. Last autumn, in its first guise, 6,000 people went to attend the big screen projections of daily chronicals, satirist fictions or purely esthetical subjects, entirely filmed with mobile phones.

The second Pocket Film Festival, organized by the French organisation Forum des Images in association with the mobile phone company SFR, will take place in Paris in October at the Pompidou Centre, where directors, of any experience, will compete for three days.