Apple’s long-running Shot on iPhone campaign hinges on a promise. Captured with this phone, your life will bloom with beauty, drama and pixel-perfect grandeur.
But our lives our not cinematic. Or rather, our deepest emotions – love, grief, hope, jealousy – get flattened by our phones into something decidedly uncinematic.
Zach Dorn nails this in Moomin (2022). The film tells the story of a sweet but futile romantic gesture through a collage of apps, games, maps and Google searches.
Presented in portrait mode, and best viewed on a phone, it follows Zach’s attempts to win his ex-girlfriend a Moomin toy on an app where players control real claw machines.
Wrapped in this quirky premise are themes of love and loss, memory and loneliness. I think at its heart it’s a story about addiction – to our phones, to the illusion of control, and to what Zach calls “the protocols of romantic relationships.”
Not bad for five minutes of screen recordings.
I spoke with Zach from his home in Los Angeles. You can see more of his work on his website and his Vimeo.
Why did you want to tell this story?
I think this film is very sincere in its intentions. It legitimately was an attempt to win the Moomin for this girl.
I'm almost surprised by that. Usually there's some story that goes along with a film, but there really wasn't anything else to it.
I was quite lonely and finding some comfort playing that game obsessively – thinking about the game a lot, and thinking about her a lot. And they just kind of converged into this idea.
At the time, I was actually trying to make another film – a sort of personal memoir – that was way too ambitious. It was dealing with ideas that were very challenging.
And so in a lot of ways, this film was a nice antidote to what felt impossible. Like, oh, you could also make something with no budget, in in a week or two, that is maybe just as genuine.
I have such an antagonistic relationship to my phone. Like, if I'm sitting at a table and my phone falls off, I feel good. Like, fuck you!
So in a lot of ways, this felt like I was reconfiguring and reclaiming the iPhone space for something that was more fun, and more like I was in control.
What were the biggest challenges?
Winning the Moomin was, believe it or not, an actual challenge.
There's a scene I didn't include in the movie, where another customer went into the room, someone who has nothing to do with the project, and won a Moomin literally right in front of me.
I was just wasting the coins; I could not get it. At the time I was at Aspen Shorts, and I was waking up really early in the morning, like 7am, to win this Moomin.
The company would do corny stuff where they would take a Moomin and throw it at the target. They didn't quite get it. And then of course it, it really did malfunction in the end.
What would you do differently if you made the film again?
I think sometimes the film feels a little bit like an ad, and the relationship to Clawee feels uncritical.
Maybe there could have been some criticality towards what is going on with this app, in terms of how much money people are wasting on it.
What are you most proud of?
I like the delivery. When I was in my teens and my 20s, I was really into the theatre. Theatre has such a presentational affect, and fighting against affect is such a challenge for me.
I'm getting closer to tamping it down, and trying to find voiceover that doesn't feel too dry, but feels sincere.
Even in the work I'm making now, I'm always trying to figure out how to get closer to a conversation. And I mean that genuinely – how to have a conversation with the viewer that really does feel like I'm letting you in, without a lot of pretence.
How did making this film change you?
This was not the film I set out to make. That's what I learned – I should give up control a little bit. And I think it reminded me of a type of freedom, that filmmaking can still be fun.
As your career progresses, expectations change, and you have certain goals for yourself. But you begin to question whether or not those goals are part of what you really want, or if they're part of what people want from you.
Like, is it genuine self-definition, or does it become self-definition for weird, sick professional reasons? Sometimes you're working on a project and you don't know which one it is.
And I hate that space. But once in a while, you'll just make something because you're excited to make it.
With animation, because it takes so long, you have so much time to question it. That becomes antagonistic – you have to rediscover the film all the time.
But with this film, it never let me down. Like it was quick enough and fun enough that I never felt like I had to re-find why I was making it, or the passion, or the magic in it.
Knowing yourself is, famously, one of the most important skills we need to develop. But it’s also one of the hardest and as Zach says, it’s easy to end up in a situation where you’re not really sure why you’re doing something.
I would venture that applies as much to making this film as it does to trying to win the Moomin in the first place.
Thanks to Zach, and to you for being here. It means a great deal.