The Doc Is In at Sundance Festival : Movies: Accomplished, emotion-filled documentaries leap to the center of attention at the annual film competition.

This is the year the understudy went out there and came back a star. Documentary films, perennially in the shadow of the more glamorous dramatic competition, find themselves the surprising center of attention at the current Sundance Film Festival. When the buzz turns to the movies that have aroused emotions and made connections, they have been invariably--unexpectedly--of the nonfiction kind.

One reason is that some of the more eagerly awaited dramatic films, such as Jennifer Lynch’s NC-17 rated “Boxing Helena,” have not always rewarded expectations. Another is that a sizable portion of the competition directors are first-timers in their 20s who display the tentativeness and anomie that go with that particular territory. Their films seem fearful of feeling too much, of engaging the viewer and not letting go.

The docs, on the other hand, have been extremely accomplished and not shy about venturing into highly emotional territory. More than a few people have begun to cry during “Silverlake Life: The View From Here,” the video diary of two HIV-positive men, and when “Earth and the American Dream” had its first showing, the audience gave it an almost unprecedented five-minute standing ovation. “I had to ask them to sit down,” a still-astonished director Bill Couturie said a few days later. “It was one of the high points of my life.”

An articulate, lightly bearded man of 41, Couturie comes out of the San Francisco Bay area filmmaking community, having worked with both John Korty and “Unforgiven” screenwriter David Peoples, who used to join him in evening sessions of Wild Turkey and cigars as they both edited cartoons for “Sesame Street.” Couturie went on to direct the Oscar-winning documentary “Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt” for HBO, but when the network asked him to do a film on the environment, he was somewhat less than thrilled.

“I told them, ‘I hate films on the environment,’ and they said, ‘that’s why we want you to do one. We want one the audience will want to see.’ ”

The result, which will air on HBO on Earth Day, April 22, and probably have a theatrical release as well, is not the usual environmental film. One reason is Couturie’s sensibility and the other is his unexpected take on the subject matter.

“My documentaries are what I would call a very pure form of filmmaking,” he says. “I try to create an emotional journey by combining images, words and music in an impressionistic style. There are no talking heads and it’s not didactic. I believe if you can grab someone’s heart, their heads will follow.”

Also, Couturie decided that while most environmental films tend to be about yes, the environment, to focus on that was to miss the point. “We are the issue, the way we live our lives is the issue. From the first Europeans on, people have come here with the idea of getting rich. Even Columbus’ deal was 10% of what he found; he was the Mike Ovitz of the 15th Century. If people got in the way, we killed them. If species like the buffalo got in the way, we killed them. The world was our oyster and we were here to pluck it.”

To convey this idea in pictures, Couturie started with words. His co-writer Ken Richards (“a one-man research team”) spent 2 1/2 years going through thousands of books looking for original quotations from throughout American history to illustrate the views both of the dominant culture and the dissenters toward the environment, a word that didn’t even appear in the literature until the 1970s.

The result is some 50 quotes, everyone from George Washington complaining about land being ruined to Andrew Carnegie rhapsodizing about the making of steel. To read these, Couturie made use of marquee-value actors like Bette Midler (who fulfilled a longstanding desire to sound like Eleanor Roosevelt while reading the words of economist Christine Frederick) and Dustin Hoffman, who was so busy it took a year to get him into a recording studio, where he spent an hour and a half getting a 40-second bite as war correspondent Ernie Pyle sounding just right.

After the words came the pictures, some shot by Couturie but mostly gleaned from a worldwide canvassing of more than 80 archives, both of film (more than 2,000 hours were viewed) and still photography. “I called it a search for haiku history, for those pictures that would suffice for a thousand words,” the director explains. “My stock footage researchers tore their hair out when I told them I wanted images that had resonance, but that’s what I was looking for.”

The pictures Couturie came up with include a 19th-Century glimpse of one of the last of the enormous buffalo herds (found in the paper print collection of the Library of Congress) to a still photo of a pile of buffalo skulls three stories high. The toughest material for him to take was contemporary footage of baby seals being clubbed to death followed by a shot of a dump truck disgorging a mountain of carcasses. “I cried like a baby,” he says.

Despite feelings like this, “Earth and the American Dream” works at not being preachy, offering rather an impressionistic history of how we got where we are today. “I’m not saying our forefathers were all a bunch of creeps, the purpose is not to criticize our ancestors but to show we have been doing the same thing for hundreds of years,” the director says. “What’s different now is that there are more of us, our technology is more destructive, and we’ve run out of new places to go.”

One thing making this film didn’t do for its director is make him more optimistic about the future. “I ended with a quote from Black Elk because to me the answer is not from without but from within our hearts,” he says. “We have to change the way we live, our value system. It’s not a black-and-white issue, it’s not advocating that we become hunters and gatherers, but we’re out of balance, we’ve gone too far in the technical mode.”

On a personal level, making this film has made some definite changes in the way Couturie thinks about his own life. “I used to have a burning desire to make dramatic films in Hollywood, and that’s not quite the same as it was,” he says with a small smile. “The notion of getting rich and famous, that’s sort of fallen away.”