Video and film have turned digital, and digital technology has significantly informed the way we think about cinema. It seems to command us to revise even our most basic understanding of what fi lm is or of how it operates. However, the full extent of the digital era has probably yet to be grasped. Most writing about – or even the most common sense of – digital cinema is concerned with special effects and technological innovation, which can be notably observed in Hollywood blockbusters. Digital aesthetics and possibilities are flourishing in many areas (from film to advertisement, design and science). Almost everyone now has the technical tools and basic skills needed to produce moving images; by casually holding a (now digital) camera of some kind, everyone is potentially a filmmaker or videographer. The smartphone and the digital video camera are the more portable, perhaps more intuitive heirs to the 8mm, 16mm, and video cameras of the past. The history of the portable camera dates back to the beginning of fi lm (from Marey's 1882 photographic gun to Prószyński's 1909 compressed-air-powered Aeroscope, to his later 120mm domestic camera, the Oko, and so on). If digital cinema is often understood as a break with past film aesthetics, this essay rather sees continuity. Digital culture preserves and prolongs video culture. Indeed, amateur images produced by domestic cameras are also part of digital culture, or of the culture of digital moving images. These ‘domesticated’ uses of digital technology have been investigated by numerous studies (e.g. visual anthropology, focusing on private, non-industrial usages of moving images, or the aesthetics of the so-called ‘poor image’ as opposed to the obsession with high-resolution digital image), and have been contributing to visual artistic practices (e.g. new media art, video installations). The aim of this essay is to investigate the use of video and digital images in the context of minor national cinemas (through the Polish example), and to note how digital filmmaking is also a continuation not only of argentic filmmaking but also of video aesthetics, of video not as art (video art) but as common practice.