While obscure auteurs such as Isabel Coixet and Brillante Mendoza are fêted and fawned over, a British film-maker whose work has been seen by more than a million people in the past fortnight is wandering the Cannes Film Festival with no entourage, no publicity team and nowhere to sleep.

Peter Johnston wants to alert the world to what he believes is the antidote to the bloated, self-indulgent arthouse movie: the 15-second film. He has commissioned or made 62 of these nano-films for his online gallery, The 15 Second Film Festival.

To qualify, films must be 15 seconds in length, with 10 seconds for opening and closing credits. Typically each takes “two weeks of leisurely preparation”, about half a day to film and three days to edit — rather less than the four years it took to make Up, the festival’s opening-night film.

Prevailing trends are against him. Half the films gunning for the Palme d’Or this year are more than two hours long. The early favourite, A Prophet, is an epic 2½-hour French prison drama.

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Critics are grumbling about the running time for Quentin Tarantino’s new offering Inglorious Basterds: you could fit 640 of Mr Johnston’s mini-films into its 2 hours and 40 minutes.

But Mr Johnston, 43, is undaunted. “Fifteen-second film is an art form in itself, not a stepping stone to making longer movies,” he said. “It’s like a filmic haiku or a three-panel cartoon strip.

“All the same creative cogs are engaged as when you make a full length film. You have to think about the sound design, the timing and economy of shot. We’ve made documentaries, comedies and two spaghetti westerns.

“Not all of them are successful but film-makers love it because it’s so immediate.”

Mr Johnston’s films are not showing at Cannes but he has been invited to exhibit at venues including the Sundance Festival. Roddy Doyle, the writer, has completed a film for him and he claims that Neil Jordan, the director of The Crying Game, and Wayne Coyne, the frontman of the band the Flaming Lips have both agreed to have a go.

Mr Johnston, from Belfast, came to Cannes with nowhere to sleep and €200 (£175), the price of one night in a cheap room in the centre of town.

A large man with a broad, red face beneath a shock of grey curls, mirror-lensed shades and a handlebar moustache, he sports a tweed jacket with a cigar tucked in the top pocket and carries a large inflatable pig and a battered suitcase. The pig is supposed to be a swine flu joke. The suitcase is his office and his luggage. It contains hair spray, a pair of fresh sports socks, a stack of demo DVDs and a camera.

He is extremely serious about his vision. He sees the future of the cinema screened in bite-sized snatches on iPhones, BlackBerrys and e-readers.

“What I’m doing with the 15-second film project is the birth and rebirth of cinema,” he said.

His latest effort, iSnort has had more than 1.2 million hits on YouTube in the past week. It shows him “snorting” three lines of “cocaine” off his mobile phone. The white powder is really a 15-second animation on the phone’s screen. It is a gimmick, but he also sees it as proof of the appeal of his medium. “I’m an action artist and a film-maker. What did Warhol say? Art is what you can get away with.”

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