LEWISTON — An offshoot of the Lewiston Auburn Film Festival is targeting a generation of storytellers who’ve grown up with the tools to make a movie tucked in their pockets.

“Now, you can make a movie with your cellphone,” Joshua Shea, the festival’s director, said. “We want students to get their stuff shown and get them excited.”

On Jan. 12, the University of Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College will host the first of two semifinal rounds of the festival’s Student Film Competition. The second round will be held four weeks later on Feb. 9. And the best from those two rounds will be screened and juried during the festival.

Winners will be announced at the festival gala April 6.

Already, about two dozen movies have been submitted across three categories, Shea said. He hopes another 20 or more will submit their work over the next month.

“These are made by people who have never known a world without the Internet,” Shea said. “They’ve never known a world without 800 TV channels. They have a different perspective of the world than people 15 or 20 years older than them. I’m curious to see how that evolves in film making considering how much technology has changed.”

Already, the young storytellers have proven to be a force at the festival, which enters its third year April 4.

Some of the 2012 festival’s best movies were created by kids.

Students from Sanford High School created “April’s Heart,” which competed for Best Maine Film. A six-minute silent movie, “Ouija,” shot by Gray-New Gloucester High senior Grace Powell also drew attention. She has since graduated and is enrolled in the film program at Emerson College in Massachusetts.

Many others were edged out by adults, Shea said.

“We just had so many of these student films right on the bubble last year that we wanted to have this separate competition,” he said. “One of the reasons we’re doing this is to try and get as many 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds as we can involved.”

The contest is open to anyone under 18. It is also open to people 18 to 22 who are still enrolled in a post-secondary school.

The movies are divided into three categories: “shorts” defined as 10 to 45 minutes long, “micro-shorts” lasting up to 10 minutes and public service announcements that can last up to three minutes. It costs nothing to enter.

So far, the student films have hit a wide array of genres.

“They’re really all over the map,” Shea said. “You’ll get little weird sci-fi films. You’ll get teenager-in-love films.”

So far, all the student films have come from within a school group.

“A lot of these films seem to come with some kind of a message,” he said.

Shea believes the student competition may be the festival’s best chance of showcasing the next Steven Spielberg, George Lucas or Francis Ford Coppola.

“For a lot of the people we feature, it’s a hobby,” Shea said. “It’s a very serious hobby, but it’s nonetheless still a hobby.””

For the majority of the kids, anything is still possible, he said.

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