He is better known for his work on brick, plasterwork, portable toilets and even, on one memorable occasion, an elephant. But until now the artist known as Banksy, in creating his satirical artworks, has largely stuck to the old-fashioned mediums of painting and sculpture.

Today, however, it emerged that the graffiti artist and cultural bête noire has branched into filmmaking, with the release of what is described as "the worlds first street art disaster movie".

Exit Through the Gift Shop, which will have its international premiere on Sunday at the Sundance film festival, is described by its creator as "the story of how one man set out to film the unfilmable - and failed", and by the festival's organisers as "an amazing ride, a cautionary modern fairy tale ... with bolt cutters".

Banksy's spokeswoman, Jo Brooks, declined to elaborate much further on the plot of the 89-minute feature film, though the festival's website helpfully provides some details, describing it as the account of what happened when a French filmmaker, Terry Guetta, set out to record the "secretive world" of street art, only to meet Banksy, at which point "things took a bizarre turn".

Pressed for more detail, the artist himself offered the following, hardly illuminating, elaboration through his publicist: "It's a film about a man who tried to make a film about me. Everything in it is true, especially the bits where we all lie."

The film's trailer shows footage of a number of street artists, their identities not always clear, captured in the rather shambolic act of creating graffiti artworks ‑ slipping off platforms, spilling paint and being intercepted by police and security guards.

"In a world without rules," reads the tagline, "one man broke them all." Though the artist, who scrupulously guards his anonymity, does appear in the film, his identity, despite rumours to the contrary, is not revealed, said Brooks.

It is a departure for the artist, who has come some way from his beginnings as an underground rebel in Bristol in the early 1990s to a position dangerously approaching that of establishment darling. A major show in that city's museum last summer attracted 350,000 visitors in nine weeks and is thought to have contributed £10m to Bristol's economy, while 93% of local residents voted in favour of the city council preserving rather than removing a Banksy artwork of a naked man dangling from a window.

The artist, many of whose works are comical spoofs of other works, these days even attracts his own unscrupulous imitators ‑ an exhibition on fakes and forgeries curated by the Metropolitan police and opening on Saturday at the Victoria and Albert includes a number of fake Banksy artworks.

John Cooper, director of the Sundance festival, described Exit Through the Gift Shop as "one of those films that comes along once in a great while, a warped hybrid of reality and self-induced fiction, while at the same time a totally entertaining experience. The story is so bizarre I began to question if it could even be real ... but in the end I didn't care.

"I feel bad I won't be able to shake the filmmaker's hand and tell him how much I love this film. I think I will shake everyone's hand that day and hope I hit on Banksy somewhere. I love his work in all forms."