#BingeRecommends: 4 MAMI select short films that deserve your attention

Filmed on an iPhone, these MAMI select short films deserve a place on your watchlist as they combine the idea of filming on a phone with concepts so unique that filmmaking itself gets reinvented!

Gone are the days when filmmaking was accessible to only a few! Today, all a filmmaker needs is a story, a vision, and the courage to pursue it. With technology evolving rapidly, even a smartphone can now serve as a powerful tool for cinematic storytelling. And a striking example of this is the 2025 edition of MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone, a program that celebrates the possibilities of mobile filmmaking. In its second year, the initiative sees four emerging Indian filmmakers, Amrita Bagchi, Rohin Raveendran Nair, Chanakya Vyas, and Shalini Vijayakumar on the path of crafting bold, original stories entirely shot on the iPhone 16 Pro Max. Mentored by the acclaimed Vikramaditya Motwane, Lijo Jose Pellissery, Vetri Maaran, and Konkona Sen Sharma, these films cross borders, languages, and genres to present a kaleidoscope of perspectives.

What’s fascinating is how each filmmaker finds a unique visual and narrative vocabulary, some lean into absurdist realism, others into ghost stories or childhood innocence. One story is told through the lens of a typewriter, another through a child’s. Colour palettes like indigo, red, or stark black and white are used as allegories, and a fashion show becomes a powerful act of reclaiming legacy for the erased and overlooked. In a world where storytelling is suffering, these films prove that sometimes, all you need is a different lens, literal and metaphorical, to tell stories that break through the clutter. After all, when was the last time you saw an object go into oblivion, reminding us of love’s quiet persistence?

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Here's what we recommend!

Seeing Red

What is it about the colour red, women, and ghosts? A weird combination that comes together compellingly in this Tamil short film directed by Shalini Vijayakumar. The story employs the metaphor of a female ghost of Mahalaxmi, initially visible only to the first three women in a household to highlight the everyday subjugation of women. The colour red becomes an allegory here as the three women simmer with rage, which is misinterpreted as guilt. A young girl, Krithi gets slapped for entering a temple after getting her first period, a young woman, Dhivya is denied her right to work, and an elderly woman, Hema is burdened with caregiving responsibilities.

While a two other women of the household attempt to speak up for them, the men of the household remain rooted in rigid patriarchy, going so far as to call in a lower-caste shaman, Vippadi Moorkan to exorcise the “hysteria” out of the women. What follows is an uprising, gently and satirically led by the ghost, helping the women reclaim their voice, except Krithi, who finds her strength organically. Mentored by Vetri Maaran, this slapstick satire is as sharp as it is hilarious. It’s a sobering reminder that education, caste, or religion do little to stop patriarchy; it’s systemic and everywhere. It’s almost poetic that today, it takes a ghost to remind us that women deserve the simple freedom to dance, speak, and live freely in their homes. 

Kovarty

If you’ve ever found yourself missing the soft, dreamy phase of romanticising life, this short offers a gentle half-hour escape with utterly mesmerising frames. Directed by Rohin Raveendran Nair, this Malayalam film tells a whimsical love story between a typist and a typewriter. Contrasting the binary natures of the typed world and the emotional hues of life, words typed on the machine appear in black and white, while everything else is in colour. In an age where loneliness is outsourced to AI and Chat GPT might be your go-to companion, this film offers a place beyond the dark, harsh reality of falling in love with machines. It imagines a more poetic connection between an inanimate object and a young girl. Mentored by Lijo Jose Pellissery, Kovarty finds beauty in simplicity, framed like a memory from a black-and-white romance era. The typewriter is not just a relic of the past but a silent witness to history, revolutions, applications, inter-caste love stories, all typed on QWERTY. It’s literal and metaphorical, a story of touch, memory, and magic. After all, isn’t it romantic in itself that a typewriter reminds us how to fall in love again?

Mangya

The loss of a friendship cuts deeper than we often admit, especially in childhood, when it's our entire world. The Marathi short film Mangya, directed by Chanakya Vyas and mentored by Konkona Sen Sharma, captures this tender heartbreak through the eyes of a boy named Sanket. When his best friend Mangesh moves away, Sanket finds comfort in a rooster he names Mangya. But when a bird flu outbreak leads to a mass culling, Sanket panics and hides Mangya in a storeroom, trying to protect him. What follows is a sweet, anxious journey of a boy skipping school, hiding secrets, and clinging to the last threads of friendship before, tragically, the rooster suffocates, boxed in too tightly during an attempted escape. This poignant story is a gentle, heartbreaking reminder that grief and growth are intertwined. As Sanket makes new friends, Mangya’s memory lingers, bittersweet like a childhood scar that still stings sometimes, but only to remind you that it also made you into who you are today!

Tinctoria

We often speak of generational trauma as something we carry, but what if we’re also complicit in continuing it? This unsettling idea is explored in this short Hindi film directed by Amrita Bagchi. It follows Raka, a fashion designer, who stages her new collection in her great-grandfather’s non-functioning indigo factory, a decaying space she treats as a blank canvas. Like her ancestors, who romanticised slavery, Raka spins a similar narrative, blind to the violence even she conceals. Her complete disregard for workers via her actions is as thoughtless as they are symbolic. Her detachment is chilling as she pours drinking water into a dried-up fountain for ambience, and asks a tailor’s daughter to hold safety pins in her mouth. However an increasing sense of unease and horror pulls Raka into strange visions, where the factory begins to haunt her with inherited memory that takes her through the journey of how her family’s indigo empire was built on brutal labour where workers were forced into iron shackles to stay awake, their sweat collected in cups because there was no water to drink.

Mentored by Vikramaditya Motwane, the absurdist film uses surreal, metaphor-laden visuals to explore inherited violence and the danger of looking away from history. The supernatural here becomes systemic as Indigo bleeds through every frame, not as an aesthetic choice but as a stain of exploitation and erasure. Raka’s awakening comes as her illusion of control is drowned by the truth, and she claims responsibility for the past. So the film becomes a critique of privilege so numb that it repackages violence as beauty, heritage as another brand strategy to fit the aesthetic, and the past only preserved to be monetised. And so, Tinctoria asks: Are we so different from those who came before us, or have we learned how to market our indifference better?

All of these films are currently streaming on the MAMI YouTube channel!

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