We live in the age of the smartphone camera, aware that the everyday devices in our hands and pockets are increasingly able to record professional-quality images. Dancers and those who Film dance know this too, as they keep showing the world on Instagram.

This aspect of how we live now was presumably on the minds of the organizers of the Mobile Dance Film Festival at the 92nd Street Y. Presented on Saturday, close on the heels of the annual Dance on Camera festival at Lincoln Center, this festival was advertised as not just new but also novel — the first to require that all its selections be shot on mobile devices.

Beyond the novelty, what might this requirement mean? As with the rise of video a few decades ago, the relatively inexpensive and easy-to-use technology has lowered the bar of entry, so one implicit expectation for a Mobile Dance Film Festival is of voices that previously might have been excluded. The 24 movies selected (viewable, until Aug. 31, at 92y.org/dance/mobile-dance-film-festival) are diverse, at least in the sense that the filmmakers hail from 11 countries.

And the rule also raises other questions. Does the mobile dance film advance the art of choreography or of dance on film? Should it count as a new artistic category? By the evidence of this crop, not yet.

It’s a testament to the sophistication of mobile devices that the strengths and weaknesses of the films have little to do with technical issues. Several of the movies look amateurish or are just plain bad, but none because of image quality or outdated effects. The flaws are artistic: the pretentiousness, sentimentality, inscrutability and unintentional or lazy comedy that can be found in dance and film of any kind.

If there aren’t any aesthetic breakthroughs, there are some common tendencies. These movies get around a lot but don’t last very long. Mobile devices seem to encourage mobile moviemakers. And, with very few exceptions, their works are short: less than 10 minutes, with most less than five.

In some cases, the movies end before they’ve really begun to say anything. But in others, the brevity is just right. The one minute that Nicola Hepp’s “Breathe” lasts is enough to tell the story of the title’s imperative: what a hyperventilating woman in a horror-movie forest must do more slowly. If Rami Shafi’s “Nicole Wolcott in Washington Square Park” were much longer than three minutes, the buoyant joy of watching Ms. Wolcott, a sunny-spirited dancer, splash with girls in a fountain would likely deflate.

Emma Cohen’s “and the pools at the end of the world where the swallow dips her wings” has three times as many words in its title as minutes in its time span. But it’s a potent visual poem. A woman stands still at the shore of a body of water with tankers in the distance; through a time-lapse effect, her body is gradually encased in plastic wrap. Her small motions make the wrapping seem a chrysalis, beautifully iridescent. But the setting and the sound of surf make the environmental consequences of the plastic resonate, too.

In Max Stone’s two-minute “My Cup of Tea,” the duration is essential to meaning. An older woman, alone in her apartment, makes herself a cup of tea. As the water in the kettle heats, she dances to a cover of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” When the kettle starts whistling, the dance ends, and she sits to drink, looking out the window at kids at play.

As these examples suggest, including a lot of dance content was not a requirement for the festival. Only one film, Sarah Lapinksy’s “Plastic Plates Don’t Break,” made me think, “Here’s a promising choreographer.” Her work, in which two people have a silent argument amid place settings to a soundtrack of dialogue from classic Hollywood melodramas, was filmed on a stage, and is most like a document of a stage work. Almost none of the others show much of an interest in choreographic continuity and development — the ideas are more about film or narrative, the dancing shapeless and apparently improvised — as if choreography weren’t important in dance films.

Is this just the taste of the selection committee? A legacy of quick-cutting music videos? Or is it an effect of mobile technology: the increased ease of creating good-looking images tempting filmmakers away from the difficulties of constructing coherent dances?

Most often, what mobile devices seem to inspire is a desire to position dancers against the backdrops of many places. New York City is an unsurprisingly recurrent choice, but glimpses of Sweden, Kazakhstan and Poland in these films are incidental pleasures.

The most extreme example of location hopping is Jay Carlon’s “Dance Film Selfie,” which starts appealingly with him stuck overnight in a Russian airport, passing the time by improvising a dance on an escalator and sliding around the empty terminal. We then get a montage of him behaving similarly in Long Island City, West Hollywood, Frankfurt, Pismo Beach, Melbourne, Hong Kong and myriad other points on the globe. There’s a nice irony in airplane-window shots of clouds — the reverse of geographical specificity — but the cumulative impression is that the elastic Mr. Carlon has fewer dance ideas than frequent flier miles.

The film that uses the impulse toward multiple locations (and a festival-wide partiality to scenes of water) most effectively is Raven Jackson’s “A Guide to Breathing Underwater.” We find Donald C. Shorter (also credited with concept and choreography) on a New York rooftop, his worried hand motions matching the agitation of the music, part of Ravel’s “Gaspard de la nuit.” Soon, we see him making the same motions, and larger ones, as if drowning, in many closed-in parts of downtown. (The artful editing, by Felipe Vara de Rey, deserves mention.)

When the scene shifts to him on a boat and then to a Fire Island beach, the feeling of opening up, of escape is intense, even before he strips naked and cavorts like Isadora Duncan near the waves. The freedom of his dancing has gained significance through the ways the dancer and camera have moved. If mobile devices free up more filmmakers in this way, the next mobile dance film festival could be something to see.