A Gathering of Seekers of Truth : Film: Movie-makers meet for a documentary festival and hope audiences will discover there’s nothing boring about real life.

Funding is tough, distribution is difficult, pressures of censorship loom, but as hundreds of filmmakers gather here for the first International Documentary Congress, perhaps the biggest obstacle they face is a widespread belief that documentaries are nothing but a snooze.

“It’s sort of ironic that people tend to shy away or duck for cover when they hear the word,” said Marc Weiss, the senior executive producer of the PBS documentary series “P.O.V.” “If you have a well-made film, even when they expect some dry, brittle thing, people are blown away by how powerful it is and react in ways that they never react to a fictional film.”

“When people think of documentaries, they remember those dull educational films they were forced to watch in high school,” said Nina Rosenblum, who along with William Miles produced “Liberators,” which will air on PBS next month. “What helps is when Michael Moore with ‘Roger & Me’ or Errol Morris’ ‘Thin Blue Line’ really connect, because when people see these films, they realize that documentaries are not boring, they are not didactic and they prove, I think, that there is nothing more powerful and fascinating out there than the truth.”

But Moore, whose comic lambasting of General Motors, “Roger & Me,” was one of the rare nonfiction films to lure a large moviegoing audience, countered that “so many documentaries are boring and repetitive and tell you things that you already know, or they feed it to you like castor oil or from the pulpit on high. People go to the movies to be entertained, to eat Goobers, to think a little bit, and that’s not how you describe most documentaries. I’m not here to get down on documentary filmmakers but to encourage them to try to reach a wider audience, to quit aiming just for the croissant-and-cappuccino crowd. We’re all making these films because we want to see change. How do we do that if we don’t reach out to all the Americans who aren’t part of the elite group? I want to see change occur in my lifetime. I don’t want to just preach to the converted.”

These filmmakers and scores more from around the world will address this and many other issues beginning today at the three-day convention at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills. The event, open to the public, offers screenings, presentations and panel discussions on such topics as funding, distribution, experimental new forms and using films as a tool of dissent and social change.

Several participants find the state of their art quite robust.

Harrison Engle, chair of the Congress’ organizing committee, acknowledged that many of the documentaries distributed today are not as edgy or controversial as they could be, but said that new aesthetic techniques such as the blending of fictional and nonfictional material have made documentaries potentially as exciting a medium technically and cinematically as any other. Weiss added that the quality of films he’s seen recently are better than at any time during his 20 years working in the field.

“When times are tough and there’s disorder and confusion and change, people look for information, and that’s when documentaries thrive,” said John Wilkman, president of the International Documentary Assn. “The documentarian is the one who makes connections between isolated events, who is challenged by problems, and I expect the quality and the demand for documentaries to rise during these hard times.”

“It’s been a very exciting decade, one in which the form has become more and more of an international force,” said Eric Barnouw, a film historian, whose 1973 book “Documentary: History of the Nonfiction Film” will be reissued with updated chapters on the films of the last decade. “Every home throughout the world is now equipped with VCRs to play these films, or people have access to one somewhere, whereas before, to get anything into circulation, you had to get it accepted by a licensed government media. Now you can bypass that whole problem and now you have the large circulation of videos of a dissident nature. It has become an important medium of dissent and has played a large part in politics of a number of countries such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia.”

But the documentary is nonetheless besieged with problems, even though cable television has expanded the opportunities for some filmmakers. Funding, especially for controversial or difficult material, is tougher than ever, according to several filmmakers.

Rosenblum said that she and her partner worked on and off for 10 years on “Liberators,” scraping together the money mostly from European television even though their film was a patriotic view of an untold story of African-American soldiers in World War II.

She said that the bad economy and increasingly conservative point of view of many state endowments has made finding money tougher than even a few years ago, and that “bodes very badly for more controversial or dissenting opinions and films. It’s so important to tell the truth in light of the kind of fantasy that Hollywood is producing, but unfortunately the really vital contribution of the documentary is going to be diminished by the fact that you can barely survive making them.”

And even if they get made, getting them seen is even more daunting. Mitchell Block, president of Direct Cinema, a company that distributes documentary films theatrically, said that 90 cents of every dollar spent at the movies goes to one of the big studio films. Everything else, including the independent fictional films, are fighting for the last dime, and unless a documentary has some kind of hook--such as a big-name director like Michael Apted or is built around a celebrity like Madonna or Francis Ford Coppola--it is difficult to find screen time or money to promote it. He acknowledged that “The Civil War” was a smash on PBS, but he attributed much of its success to a huge promotional campaign that was funded by General Motors.

“The good news is that the public will support all kinds of documentaries if they hear about it and the media calls attention to it,” said Block, whose company is screening documentaries at the Laemmle Sunset 5 Theaters for a week beginning Friday. “The bad news is that something like Barbara Kopple’s ‘American Dream,’ a brilliant but sort of down story, doesn’t get wide exposure, while something that took place 100 years ago is an enormous success.”

This sort of two-tier system of distribution that sees films with a hook grabbing distribution deals while many other worthy films languish unseen is simply a fact of a film business that measures success mostly by number of tickets sold, several filmmakers said. Some, such as “P.O.V.’s” Weiss, claim that every time one of these high-profile documentaries makes good, it prompts the public to be more accepting and more intrigued by all kinds of documentaries.

But others, such as Jean-Pierre Gorin, a filmmaker and professor of visual arts at UC San Diego, argue that the resurgence of these documentaries both in the theaters and on television simply reinforces classical cliches and assumptions about the documentary. Many of these films, he said, are rather “straightforward and turgid” and don’t do anything to pave the way or create a need for more adventurous work. Distributors and television just want more of the same, Gorin said, not the cutting-edge films that blend fictional and nonfictional techniques that he favors.

“I can’t say that there is a resistance among people to go see more difficult kinds of films, because they have never been tested,” said Gorin, whose part-fiction, part-real-life film about Samoan-American gang members in Long Beach has played on television in Europe and at film festivals around the world but has not been widely viewed here. “It’s the same old crap that rules the roost. The films that we see here are not challenging, not difficult; they are simply a bit more nimble.”

The Documentary Congress culminates Friday with the International Documentary Association’s annual awards presentation. The winners--Miles’ and Rosenblum’s “Liberators,” Rea Tajiri’s “History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige,” David Van Taylor’s “Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest,” “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” Morris’ “A Brief History of Time” and USC student Lisa Kors’ “Shayna Maidels: Orthodox Jewish Teen-Age Girls”--will be screened in succession beginning at noon Saturday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater. All the filmmakers will be present at a public discussion of their work following the screenings at 7:30 p.m.

For information on the schedule or admission price to the various events, call (310) 284-8422.