Robert Bradbrook's short film Home Road Movies uses an untraditional but effective combination of live action and 3-D animation to tell the story of a father who equates his family car with happiness. View Slideshow 
"I love short films -- I call them cinema snacks. These nice tasty cinema snacks that don't fill you up," said indie film director Todd Lincoln.
His new short film Leave Luck to Heaven, about cybersex and virtual identity, is one in a smorgasbord of 60 tasty cinema snacks at the Resfest film festival. The five-day annual festival kicks off in San Francisco on Wednesday at the Palace of Fine Arts, before moving on to tour over a dozen other cities around the world.
Unlike the prepackaged vending-machine fare offered by Hollywood and MTV, Resfest celebrates the most wild and unexpected flavors in international film and music video.
French director Michel Gondry's whimsical music video turns rock performance clichés upside down by transforming members of the band White Stripes into animated Lego models of themselves. Lego rockers may sound a bit silly, but the bright primary colors and raw pixelated look of Gondry's film perfectly match the band's punk energy.
The experimental piece is part of Videos That Rock, one of the new programs in this year's festival lineup.
Other filmmakers in the festival also bring fresh approaches to old genres, gleefully breaking all the rules.
British director Robert Bradbrook tweaks the documentary genre in Home Road Movies, using a radical mix of 3-D animation, live action and old family photos to tell the story of a father using his spiffy car to try to bond with his wife and kids. The film appears in the Drive Me Crazy program of short road movies.
A program of unconventionally erotic films called In the Bedroom includes director Junji Kojima's The End of Shite, a fanciful music video in which tiny animated dwarves merrily climb over a woman's body.
In addition to several themed collections of film shorts programs, Resfest includes two feature films: the hip-hop documentary Breath Control: History of the Human Beatbox and the Hong Kong action thriller Fulltime Killer.
But the shorts and cutting-edge conceptual music videos are the real stars of the show. The six-year-old festival has always shone a spotlight on those often-neglected art forms.
Resfest director Jonathan Wells lamented the fact that there aren't more venues for short films. He said one festival program, Director's Club, sprang from the need to provide a place for rarely shown short works by acclaimed directors such as Mike Mills and Spike Jonze.
Resfest also showcases experimental music videos from around the world that are rarely seen elsewhere -- despite the fact that they have avid fans. The festival's program of electronic music videos has been popular every year, consistently selling out, Wells said.
Wells' approach to selecting music videos is quite different from that of, say, MTV.
"Their thought is, if the record's not available to buy in the store, why should they be promoting it?" he said. "Whereas I just think music video ... deserves to be seen, in and of itself. I think that in the very best case, these things are not just a commercial for a record, but they can be truly an art form."
Every Montage Tells Another Story
