Of all the programs under the umbrella of the Utah Arts Festival, Fear No Film is different in two important ways:

1. It's free, even if you don't buy a ticket to the festival.

2. It's air-conditioned.

But like the rest of the Utah Arts Festival, Fear No Film -- running Thursday through Sunday in the City Library auditorium -- offers a wide and strange variety of short films, ranging from documentaries to avant-garde art films.

One annual highlight is the Utah Short Film of the Year competition, featuring eight shorts by veteran and student filmmakers.

The remaining shorts are divided into seven categories, named (in a quirky twist) for the seven dwarves:

Sleepy » Features shorts that played at major film festivals. One highlight is "The Fence," Rory Kennedy's doc (which premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival) about the border fence being built between Mexico and the United States.

Sneezy » Described as "stark, biting films [that] will cause uncontrollable reactions." They include Jesse Epstein's funny doc "Wet Dreams and False Images," an insightful look at photo retouching that raises issues about commercials and unrealistic standards of physical beauty.

Dopey » Films "intended to let your brain disengage and imagine." One of the films in this program is "Kapsis," an 8-minute collaboration between Harvard students Yen-Ting Cho and Edgar Barroso, combining flute, electro-acoustic music and video art to tell the Nahua myth of a girl who becomes a starfish.

Docs » Documentaries, natch. Among them is Sam Derby's "The Fall of the Cougar," which takes the nature-show approach in tracking women who hang out in bars and the men who hunt them.

Happy » Not happy stories, but stories that make you happy you're not living them. A highlight is Miguel Cima's "Dig Comics," a winner at the 2009 Comic Con International Film Festival, which asks why comic books struggle to find an audience in an age when comic-book movies are big sellers.

Grumpy » A self-explanatory title, and the centerpiece is "Eye to Eye," made by four California filmmakers about conservationists' efforts in Cameroon's rain forests to protect endangered chimpanzees and gorillas from bush-meat hunters.

Bashful (or not) » A collection of films that use "a playful exploration of symbols, signs and imagery." One of the films is Aurelio Voltaire's 3-minute "DemiUrge Emesis," a look at the artistic process narrated by composer Danny Elfman and set to the music of Rasputina.

Each program will be preceded with 20 minutes of child-friendly programming, to give families with kids a place to get out of the heat.

For a full schedule, go to www.uaf.org/fear-no-film-mb.