MSTERDAM, Nov. 29 - If sheer numbers mean anything, the much-discussed documentary-film revival of the last year continues unabated: attendance by industry professionals was up more than 20 percent, to 2,300 from 1,900 a year earlier, at the just-ended International Documentary Film Festival here, regarded by many as the genre's equivalent of the far glossier annual film festival at Cannes.
What remains less clear is whether the documentary world's next wave will remain as firmly polemical as the last, which grabbed attention and a surprisingly large share of the box office for hard-edged message films like "Fahrenheit 9/11," "Super Size Me" and "Control Room."
Major prizes at the Amsterdam festival - where the memory of Theo van Gogh, whose murder this month, the police say, was committed by a Muslim extremist in response to one of Mr. van Gogh's films, loomed large - went to works that took a head-on look at tensions within and around Islam. Top honors went to Leonard Retel Helmrich's "Stand van de Maan" ("Shape of the Moon"), about an Indonesian Christian woman confronting poverty and rising Islamic fundamentalism in Jakarta, while the youth film prize was awarded to "Nabila," about a female Muslim rap artist in Sweden.
In another bow to world politics, the festival's "audience award" went to "The Yes Men," an American film that chronicles the adventures of prankster activists who have made a career of sorts out of mimicking representatives of the World Trade Organization.
But the festival's forum, in which 45 aspiring documentarians get 15 minutes each to pitch their dreams to gatekeepers from HBO, PBS, Sundance, the BBC and other buyers, showed no discernible limits when it came to proposed subjects for next-generation films. Ideas ranged from a movie about the making of a North Korean film similar to "Titanic," to a look at Kabul's Icelandic peacekeepers, who lack actual military experience because Iceland lacks an actual military.
"We're seeing more and more hybrids," said Diane Weyermann, director of the Sundance Institute's documentary film program, who pointed to increasing doses of reality-television-style gimmickry, animation and drama in today's documentaries. "For so many years, documentaries were seen as medicinal - worthy but boring," she added. "But I think that has really been shattered now."
David Kwok, a programmer for the TriBeCa Film Festival, agreed. "People are attuned to seeing nonfiction on television now. It's not so ghettoized anymore, and people don't differentiate as much."
At least some observers believe surging interest in documentaries has been fed not so much by a heated political environment as a welcome injection of humor. "The media is not doing its job, so comedy has taken over the documentary," said Andy Bichlbaum, one of the jokesters who figure in "The Yes Men." "Michael Moore is sort of a comedian as well as a documentary maker."
But other industry veterans are less certain that documentaries are experiencing a rebirth at all. "I think it's a fantasy to say that it's the renaissance of documentary filmmaking," said Frederick Wiseman, who first rose to prominence with "Titicut Follies," his 1967 exposé of a state prison for the criminally insane. "It's only that never before has the announcement of the wave been quite as strong."
By Mr. Wiseman's account, documentary filmmaking quickly lost its commercial footing after seeming to gain traction in the early 1990's, when the basketball-themed "Hoop Dreams" won prizes and took in about $8 million at the box office for Fine Line Features, and in the mid-1960's, when "The Endless Summer" brought surf culture to the fore.
And there were already signs of documentary fatigue, even at the industry's principal gathering, which ended on Sunday.
"One of the things that feature docs have spawned is a real avoidance of good journalistic research," said Sydney Suissa, a vice president of National Geographic Channels International, and one of the buyers listening to those four dozen would-be sellers at the forum. "It's like, I have an idea about this, and I'm going to go on a journey. A lot of those personal-journey films I find a little tedious."
