Call it the Jerry Seinfeld approach: Remain committed to being the best in the industry, sense when the tide is turning, and bow out when you can still leave them wanting more.

Such is the fate of the New York Underground Film Festival, which begins its 15th and final edition Wednesday evening at Anthology Film Archives, screening more than 100 short films and 14 features through next Tuesday. But unlike so many other film events across the country that have fizzled with little fanfare, the Underground Festival, New York’s annual celebration of all things cinematically fringe and unconventional, clearly intends to make the most of its untimely demise.

“We wanted to go out with bang,” one of the festival’s organizers, Kevin McGarry, said. “We were thinking of how we wanted to celebrate the 15th anniversary, and it seemed like it was actually a good time to retire. There’s been a lot of change within the organization in the last five years, and more than that, the Underground Film Festival arrived at a time in the early ’90s when the underground meant something more concrete than it does now — where we could bring together an audience that was hungry for work that didn’t have an established audience anywhere else. Nowadays, there are more places to see that kind of work.”

Which is to say: the Internet. In an era of instant access to an endless digital horizon, what has perplexed many is what an “underground” scene looks like in a digital age. Looking for those hard-to-find short films? Log on to YouTube. Craving more experimental or avant-garde visions? Search Google for one of the thousands of Web sites packed with live streaming video (not to mention VHS-to-video and celluloid-to-video transfers).

But Mr. McGarry said the culprit is not that easy to pin down. Indeed, “culprit” isn’t the right word. The Underground Film Festival remains healthy in terms of finances, attendance, and filmmaker interest. But after 15 years of providing access to art that would otherwise go unnoticed, the UFF team decided it wanted to be proactive rather than reactive in embracing the ever-developing state of contemporary film. A change was in order in theory as well as in practice, so the festival’s directors deliberately named this year’s series the “15th and Final New York Underground Film Festival.”

“I don’t think the Internet is taking its place, and there’s still an amazing community here,” Mr. McGarry said. “We just felt it was a project with a specific purpose, and we feel that it’s run its course, that it’s time to re-evaluate what’s going on.”

As might be expected, the word “final” has caught people’s attention. As a result, Mr. McGarry said, many news outlets and movie houses have focused primarily on the history of the UFF (IFC Center hosted a UFF retrospective just last Thursday), losing sight of the here-and-now, namely the new slate of projects looking to be part of the UFF legacy.

This year’s festival opens Wednesday with the New York premiere of Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi’s “Heavy Metal in Baghdad.” A documentary focusing on Iraq’s most famous heavy metal band, the film offers a poignant look at Iraqi civilians attempting to live life as normally as possible in the days following the American invasion. The film moves on to chronicle one band’s frustrations as it flees the country with millions of other refugees amid the capital’s post-invasion violence.

The UFF’s closing-night film is Jim Finn’s “The Juche Idea,” which will screen Sunday evening in advance of the festival’s special encore screenings next Monday and Tuesday and is named after the official state ideology of North Korea. In the film, Mr. Finn investigates the structure and manipulation of visual propaganda, telling the story of a South Korean video artist who accepted a residency in North Korea and struggled to create works bearing such titles as “The Small Little Teeth of America.”

Between the opening and closing documentaries, a number of dramatic films on the UFF slate should not be missed. The metaphorical “The End of the Light Age” (Friday, 8 p.m.) features Lou Castel as an inventor in the future who experiments with different ways of evoking darkness in an effort to try to break down the light of a bright and blinding oppressive world.

Ryan Trecartin’s “I-Be Area” (Friday, 10:30 p.m.) envisions a future world in which the institutions of cloning and adoption have become entangled under the auspices of serving the consumer, and where one particular clone, I-Be2, exists as a blank slate in search of a personality.

And Kevin Jerome Everson’s “The Golden Age of Fish” (Sunday, 6 p.m.) calls attention to the ways in which reality and history are molded by the media. The film features a hero who, as a geologist, does much the same thing by excavating — and therefore constructing — the past.

As Mr. McGarry acknowledged, there will always be films like these in need of a pathway to the public, even if the formats and the modes of presentation evolve and grow. Such was the goal of the New York Underground Film Festival, as it will be the goal of a new project, spearheaded by Mr. McGarry and his UFF cohort, Nellie Killian, that will grow out of the UFF and carry the same spirit forward. The newly conceived Migrating Forms program will, according to a recent press release, “continue to produce a film and video festival in the spring, with the addition of year-round programming.”

So on the eve of his final Underground, Mr. McGarry is hoping that this new venture will help him, as well as so many other programmers around the country and the world, find an answer to the question that has often perplexed an entire community of fringe filmmakers.

“This is going to allow us to design something that’s a perfect fit,” he said. “It will help us to sort of answer the big question: ‘What does the underground mean today?’ I think its spirit is found now in a lot of places, but really, we should have an event that can zero in on it. We should be able to say exactly what that means. So it’s time to break out of the old format; time for something new.”

ssnyder@nysun.com