LOS ANGELES — In a small Los Angeles studio filled with storyboards and film posters, Lada Egorova and Thiago Aragão describe the streaming platform they co-founded, Pocket Cinema — an independent project reimagining storytelling in the age of the creator economy.
“We love cinema too much to watch it fade into content,” Egorova says. “We want to make stories that live — the kind people return to, talk about, and share.” Adds Aragão: “We're indie filmmakers who grew up at the margins of the system. Pocket Cinema is our way of creating directly for the people who love cinema, without waiting for anyone's permission.”
The founders watched the vertical-drama boom sweep across social media and saw an opening: bringing elevated, genre-driven storytelling into a format often dismissed as disposable. “We thought: what if vertical could be art? What if it could feel like cinema?” Egorova says.
Pocket Cinema's first slate spans the genres that shaped them — a western, a sci-fi, a detective noir, an action series and a rom-com — each crafted with the resourcefulness of indie filmmaking. The team is also keeping select horizontal projects. “Some stories belong in the vertical frame; others need the horizon,” Egorova says. “The format should never limit the emotion.”
More than a platform, the founders aim to build a community, with plans to open submissions for filmmakers worldwide to develop their own vertical and horizontal series. “We're not building an app,” Aragão says. “We're building a community of cinema lovers and storytellers.” Pocket Cinema launches in late 2025.
