E-Mail This Article to a Friend Digitized Resfest’s filmless film festival BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN

Resfest, the touring digital film festival making its first appearance in Boston this weekend, is hoping to make your average glitzy international film festival look like a rusty old steam locomotive chugging along the cinematic tracks. The idea is to bring artists and audiences of the plug-and-play generation a tightly packaged visual bombardment of all that’s technologically driven and boundary ignoring, to discover and showcase a new artistic and technological landscape, and to tread where other festivals dare not. In other words, to be a lot cooler than the rest.

"When we started," says festival director Jonathan Wells, "we were really the only place that was saying, ‘Filmmaking shot on digital cameras? Bring it on. Films manipulated on computers? Cool. A lot of other festivals — Sundance, Toronto, Cannes — shunned all that" with a "films are made with film" approach. Riding the roar of San Francisco’s dot-com craze, Resfest was founded eight years ago by the New York film-and-design mag Res, and it’s grown from a couple of shorts programs and a selection of music videos to a globetrotting exhibition that this year features eight themed shorts programs, a feature, a Jonathan Glazer retrospective, and a "Handheld Cinema" program.

The short film’s the thing in Resfest. The festival opens on Friday with "Shorts One," a pack of state-of-the-art stories. Wells points to Australian director Daniel Askill’s "We Have Decided Not To Die" as one of the program’s highlights. "Shorts Two" has a humorous bent, and the films in "Shorts Three" explore the tenuous split between real life and fantasy. Music videos — usually just the unfortunate concatenation of MTV, marketing, money, and music — are elevated to an art form in the two music-vid programs, "Videos That Rock" and "Cinema Electronica."

"Some of these music videos are indistinguishable from short films," Wells says. The "Videos That Rock" program features 23 videos, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry’s take on Steriogram’s "Walkie Talkie Man," Brett Simon’s "Belly," which was created on a desktop scanner for Polar Bear, and videos for the Mars Volta, Franz Ferdinand, Blonde Redhead, RJD2, and Badly Drawn Boy. This is the kind of stuff that veers away from Carson Daly and TRL and is more like art-house MTV 3. The electronica pack has work by directors and collectives including Pleix, Logan, Dougal Wilson, and Hexstatic for Air, Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, and Felix Da Housecat among others.

Last year, Resfest honored Gondry with a retrospective; this year, Jonathan Glazer, director of Sexy Beast (2001) and the forthcoming Birth (starring Nicole Kidman), gets a salute. "One of the aims of Resfest," says Wells, "is to look at artists who are really inspirational, who are heroes in this new arena of filmmaking. Glazer has a track record of doing outstanding commercials and videos, and his debut feature was amazing." Glazer has directed videos for Radiohead, Massive Attack, Nick Cave, and UNKLE and has done award-winning commercials for Guinness, Nike, Wrangler, Levi’s, and Stella Artois.

In the artist-as-activist vein, there’s the "Bushwacked" program, with shorts by Michael Moore, Johan Söderberg, and Bryan Boyce. And the British directing team Shynola, famed for their animated work with Stephen Malkmus, Radiohead, the Rapture, and Queens of the Stone Age, have selected a sampling of rarities from their archives. The forward throttle of technology will keep Resfest going, says Wells. "From the beginning, we were never like, ‘This is a fad, this is a trend.’ We intend for this to be around for a long time."

Resfest takes place this Friday through Sunday, September 17 through 19, at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $9, $7.50 for students; call (617) 876-6937, or visit www.resfest.com