Konkona Sen Sharma, Vetrimaaran, Lijo Jose Pellissery, Vikramaditya Motwane to Mentor Mumbai Fest’s iPhone Film Program (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Naman Ramachandran India’s MAMI Mumbai Film Festival is rolling out round two of its MAMI Select – Filmed on iPhone program, expanding to four languages with a high-profile mentor lineup of Indian cinema heavyweights.

The initiative has assembled a mentor panel including actor-director Konkona Sen Sharma (“A Death in the Gunj”), and filmmakers Lijo Jose Pellissery (“Jallikattu”), Vikramaditya Motwane (“CTRL”) and Vetrimaaran (“Viduthalai”).

The mentors will guide the selected filmmakers through pre-production to post-production. The 2025 program will select four emerging directors to create short films in the Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi and Tamil languages.

Each filmmaker will receive a production grant along with an iPhone 16 Pro Max and MacBook Pro for shooting and editing. Sen Sharma lauds the initiative’s “focus on enabling and providing a platform to fresh young filmmaking voices, while Pellissery says, “Given the diversity of Indian cinema, I was so happy to hear that the aim of this program is to identify and support filmmakers from different regions of India.” Motwane, returning as mentor, says: “I was completely blown away by the quality of the storytelling and the technical finesse of the short films last year.