On Oct. 6-8, the Pompidou Center, Paris’s pre-eminent museum of modern art, will host the Pocket Films Festival. Billing itself as the only event in the world to feature movies made exclusively with mobiles, it’s set to screen 80 films of widely ranging styles, themes and lengths.

The medium’s possibilities are expanding all the time. Thanks to the onrush of miniaturization and the exponential growth of digital memories, cell-phone films are getting longer and evolving into a serious art form—or at least something with serious pretensions thereto. In fact, the technical and artistic qualities of the films are so high that it is often easy to forget you’re watching a movie that was made with a device you can stick in your pocket.

“Using cell phones is a cheaper, easier and more intimate way to film,” says Laurence Herszberg, general director of the Forum des Images, which organized this festival and staged a smaller one in the Forum’s own premises last year. Because of the cell phone’s small size and ubiquity, she says, it functions like a “third eye” offering a spontaneous, upclose and personal view of the world.

We had a chance to preview seven of the films that are competing. Here are the ones that caught our eye:

“Parle avec moi” (“Talk with me”) by Caroline Delieutraz, a student at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, cunningly puts the cell phone at the center of a short comedy about modern dating and romantic relationships.

In a totally different genre, Romuald Beugnon, 31, director and screenwriter of the widely distributed shorts “Saïd” (2001) and “Béa” (2005), pushes the limits of his cell phone in his colorful, fast-paced “Pulsion scopique,” giving a pixel-textured vision of everyday life in a nameless big city that has a striking resemblance to Paris.

Marguerite Lantz, an art student at the University of Paris VIII, on the other hand, offers a new take on a famous painting in her film “Perle” (“Pearl”). You can probably guess what that masterpiece would be, but that would give the game away completely.

What’s clear from these samples, enjoyable as they were, is that a lot remains to be done before the mobile phone is really the kind of artistic tool the festival promoters have in mind. They have the intellectual notion that this should be a medium accessible to everyone. Herszberg loves to talk about a democratization of cinematic creation and distribution. And already on the Web, with YouTube, Flickr and other sites, those possibilities are being exploited. But the films in the festival were mostly shot by professionals. “The cell phone has not yet transformed everybody into a creator,” says Herszberg. The risk is that cell-phone cinema in France will become as elite and inaccessible as many other French films which are critically acclaimed and popularly, democratically ignored.

Most of the movies in the festival were shot, moreover, with the idea that they’d be shown on big screens. But the real democratization of distribution is on the Web, and on the small screens of other phones. The aesthetic implications of presenting images, sounds and stories in such minuscule formats are only beginning to be explored.

Fortunately, manufacturers aren’t waiting for the latest treatise. Cell-phone companies like Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, are picking up on the buzz and offering state-of-the-art 3G cell phones specifically adapted for making, editing, sending and receiving videos. The Nokia N93, for example, was created with videomakers in mind. This fancy gadget, which looks more like a PDA than a phone, makes DVD-quality videos thanks in part to its Carl Zeiss lens.

But don’t be surprised if it rings. With this additional high-tech development for cell phones, it is easy to forget that you can still make a call. And, video or no video, you’ll still be a target for popcorn if your phone goes off during a movie.