BARCELONA: Actor and filmmaker Robert Redford praised popular video-sharing websites such as YouTube but said quality content still came from real films.

“I am on the side of content. Technology needs it but what separates the wheat from the chaff is quality,” Redford said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Wednesday.

“YouTube and stuff like that are democratising but there is a lot of junk out there.”

Redford and telecoms industry association GSM launched a project in November 2006 to make short films for mobile phones.

So far, the Oscar-winning Redford, 71, said, five films had been made.

Redford, who founded the Sundance Film Institute to encourage independent filmmakers, said he watches films on his mobile and said art and technology need not exclude each other.

“The more art blends itself with technology, the more it will drive it,” Redford said.Redford said while entertainment on mobile phones could have an isolating effect, he was convinced people would always look for and need social interaction.

“There are all kinds of uses for cell phones but they are just another form of human connection,” Redford said.

Asked which film had lately made a lasting impression on him, Redford named the 2007 film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

The film describes the life of a 43-year-old man after he has a stroke that leaves him paralysed with his only remaining means of communication, the blinking of his left eyelid.

“You could feel the agony and what it must be like,” he said.

Of his own movies, Redford said there were too many highlights as to say which his favourite was.

“If something were to impress or satisfy me most it is having made films that I was told couldn’t be made. That was very satisfying for me,” Redford said. —Reuters