Coolest Film Festivals: Created in 2007, The Disposable Film Festival offers a democratized space where the work of zero-budget filmmakers is celebrated and exhibited.

It's the drive-in movie that's been disposed of, but it was the Disposable Film Festival which last year popularized (or perhaps debuted) the "bike-in movie," the drive-in's timely replacement in the peak oil-era. In fact, the idea is not a disposable one at all, but a repeatable experiment in audience agency and participation.

Devoted to the art of making movies without using movie cameras, the Disposable Film Festival found the perfect poster child in Memoirs of a Scanner....Carlton Evans explains the disposable DIY aesthetic: "If you have a strong concept, you can take whatever you have and make a film."

Any schnook can shoot lo-res video with a cellphone or Webcam, as you once demonstrated to your (or your lover's) satisfaction (or frustration). In the hands of artists or rabid experimentalists, though, these cheap tools produce some gritty, gripping stuff. The Disposable Film Festival showcases the best work made with nonpro gear.

As people see what others have done with ephemeral video, they build upon it... “When we finish the screening,” Mr. Evans said, “everyone feels empowered that they, too, can make a film.”

With the increasing accessibility of nonprofessional “video capturing devices,” as Slatkin calls them, the two believe a new moving image aesthetic has developed.

Slatkin and Evans say, “there is creativity in these ephemeral, on-the-fly images of our accelerated times-and a new artistic medium for both filmmakers and social advocates...”

The Disposable Film Festival responds to the fast and easy media that dominate our social lives; camera-phone party snaps clog Facebook profiles and viral videos burn out on YouTube before they fully flare up. If Marshall McCluhan's famous maxim “the medium is the message” still holds, then this media landscape must hold a pixelated mirror to a vapid, impatient culture...The resulting work offers commentary that's anything but superficial on the ephemeral nature of art in the age of YouTube.

Changing the way films are being made