FILM / The British Are Coming II: Now hear this: the British film industry is booming. And it is thanks, in part, to Eldorado. Kevin Jackson considers the documentary evidence

It may be tricky to appear gleeful and wry at the same time, but D A Pennebaker was making a fairly good stab at it in Sheffield last Friday. The American documentary director had just screened the Oscar-nominated film The War Room, which Pennebaker co-directed with his partner Chris Hegedus, and he was obviously pleased by the way the audience had chuckled and whooped their way through its absorbing, gloriously funny account of the Clinton election campaign of '92, then given it a prolonged round of applause.

Still, a question from the floor about the difficulties of financing and distributing such material could dampen the most euphoric high, so Pennebaker got even more hearty laughter with his reply, which summed up in a single witty image the life and hard times of anyone who wants to make documentaries: 'These films are the little match girls of the industry, always freezing to death outside someone's door.' Some little match girls, though, are rescued from the cold by kindly gentlemen, and in the case of The War Room it was a British benefactor who swept the waif up: 'You'll probably be pleased to hear that it was the BBC who saved our asses.'

To be exact, the rescuer was Paul Hamann, the BBC's Head of Documentaries and a long-time admirer of Pennebaker and his associates in the verite school. Hamann saw an early cut of The War Room, agreed to help with the funding, and broadcast the finished product on BBC 2 a few months ago.

This was not an isolated act of kindness towards the global sorority of match girls. Along with his colleagues and counterparts - John Birt, Will Wyatt, Alan Yentob and Michael Jackson from the BBC, John Willis and Peter Salmon from Channel 4 - Hamann is one of the patrons of Sheffield's International Documentary Festival. This year's IDF is both the first of a projected annual series and the first event of its kind to be held in this country for decades.

Pennebaker's little-match-girl quip hints at one reason why a festival of this kind has value. Documentaries can be the strays and urchins of film aesthetics as much as of film finance. Despite their illustrious antecedents - Flaherty, Resnais, Wiseman, Lanzmann, Marker, Ophuls, Jennings . . . - it is only rarely that they are granted the privilege of theatrical screenings and major reviews. 'But that's the only way they're ever going to have a real life instead of just disappearing after they're shown once on TV,' Pennebaker notes, which is why he insists on putting his work into cinemas whenever possible.

The Festival is equally concerned to emphasise that, pace the glumness of some of the forms' practitioners, extraordinary documentary work is not only being done now, but - in Britain at least - is being done in extraordinary quantities. 'I'm not surprised that Pennebaker talks like that when we've seen the erosion of money available for documentaries in the United States,' Paul Hamann says. 'And talking to our French colleagues you find out that things are pretty dire there, too, the money has been cut back year after year and a lot of really distinguished people are out of work.

'But that really isn't the case here. In this country the picture has changed: there have been so many erroneous articles written in so many journals about the demise of the documentary. I've been in documentaries for the last 20 years, and I've never known a time like the last 18 months. There's been a considerable growth, an explosion, even, on all four main channels. In popular documentary slots I have trebled the output of my department alone - we're now making, what, 170, 180 hours a year.'

The reasons for this outburst after what Hamann considers a relatively lean period of 10 years or so are complex, but the most important of them might be simplified and tagged the Yentob factor, or possibly the Eldorado knock-on. 'One of the real hits of the last year came about because of the sea- change at BBC 1. Alan Yentob is a big supporter of the documentary form, he has a gut instinct for what it can say but also for the audiences it can generate. So when he decided to fill some of the slots left vacant by the axing of Eldorado with a factual series about a children's hospital, he wasn't gambling. That series ended up getting twice the audience of Eldorado, an average of 8.6 million last year, and it's helped to compel a recognition by everyone, including the main ITV controllers, that documentaries can bring in large audiences without being schlock.'

As a result, Hamann believes, British documentary film-making is now getting back in touch with its main tradition, which began with John Grierson and the documentarists of the 1930s but which had become stale and lapsed somewhat in the Eighties. For example, one of the films which Hamann has commissioned for BBC 2's Fine Cut strand is Michael Grigsby's The Time of Our Lives, a ruminative and sorrowful study of a family in the East End, which has been inspired by the methods of the great Crown Film Unit director Humphrey Jennings, and which quotes passages from one of Jenning's most moving films, A Diary for Timothy (1945-6).

But although the British documentary tradition may have tended to be strongly national, particularly in wartime, it has seldom been a parochial one. After all, the Brazilian director Cavalcanti played an important part in its development, and Pennebaker counts it as one of his main inspirations: he has always loved films by the likes of Jennings, Basil Wright and Harry Watt, he says, ever since he was a young man and watched them at club screenings in New York.

Hamann therefore considers it entirely within his brief to fund a small number of 'authored documentaries' by the most exceptional talents in the field whatever their national origins. Pennebaker is now making another film for him, as is his compatriot Frederick Wiseman; and one of the Festival highlights was Saturday's screening of Marcel Ophuls' The Troubles We've Seen, on the reporting of the war in the former Yugoslavia, commissioned by Hamann for the Fine Cut strand.

It adds up to an impressive roster, particularly when Hamann mentions one or two of the other authored pieces that will be shown on the BBC later this year, such as Michael Apted's essay about Tiananmen Square and a film about Solzhenitsyn's return to his homeland. Hamann does foresee trouble ahead, however, and bizarrely enough it is the opposite of that mentioned in the usual Jeremiads about the British cinema's long, slow plummet into oblivion. When it comes to documentaries, he says, it's a case of too many projects, too few talents.

'So many commissioning editors are chasing a shrinking pool of talent, because we haven't been training enough of the right men and the right women to make the films - just this month it's almost impossible to get hold of a good camera person. I've got stuff commissioned but unstaffed because the right people aren't available and I won't let them go until I've got the people who can unlock their potential.'

But shortages can have their healthy sides too, and one consequence of the present state of the market is that 'I'm having to take a lot of chances on new, younger people - I mean, that's the sort of thing I'd want to do anyway, but now I have to.' Perhaps the leading members of next generation of documentarists were sitting unnoticed in the back rows of the Odeon, Sheffield throughout last week. If so, they will have learned at least one lesson from the screenings: those 'little match girls' of Pennebaker, Ophuls, Jennings and co are not the poor relations of real movies, but outstanding works in their own right. In fact, they are matchless.

The IDF continues to tomorrow (0742 796511). 'The Times of Our Lives' will be shown at the NFT on 28 April and on BBC 2 in May. The NFT series 'The Teller and the Tale: Auteurs and Television Documentaries' runs in April (071-928 3232)

(Photograph omitted)