Required: a woman’s touch?

There’s a scene at the end of Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski’s documentary, “Born Into Brothels,” in which Briski is shown walking down a Calcutta street hand in hand with the children of prostitutes. It’s a quiet, poignant scene that doesn’t grandstand. As the film makes painfully clear, Briski is not a savior. She’s a witness and a participant. She’s a documentarian.

“I was just responding to a need,” says Briski, who gave the kids cameras to record their environment and tried to get them into a boarding school. “I’m incredibly empathic. I couldn’t walk down a street in Calcutta and not be affected by the children. But I couldn’t change anybody. All I could do was open a door.”

It’s a long way from Calcutta to the Sundance Film Festival, where “Born Into Brothels” was in the documentary competition. Briski could be forgiven for being dizzied by the sight of industry people dressed in black babbling on cellphones and corporate logos plastered all over a Western town preserved in aspic.

There’s always been this kind of disconnect at the festival. But Briski and her film represent another disconnect as well. “Born Into Brothels” was one of 10 documentaries in competition (out of a field of 16) either directed or co-directed by women, whereas only four narrative competition entries were. Over the past several years, the ratio of female documentarians to female feature directors in the Sundance competitions has been 2-1.

There’s a sense in talking to the filmmakers and other observers that this has been the case for a long time and it has nothing to do with Sundance.

What it has to do with is gender traits that they recognize but are uneasy talking about. After all, it means engaging in the kinds of sweeping generalizations that have kept women down in the past. But they do it anyway. The argument most often advanced is that the doors to feature films are largely closed to women because it’s an all-boys club, whereas those to documentaries are wide open.

“I think women can’t play the feature game as well as men can, even in the independent world,” says Sheila Nevins of HBO, a prime funder and distributor of documentaries.

This is a pretty damning indictment of independent films, which are supposed to provide an alternative to white-male-dominated Hollywood. As Shola Lynch, whose documentary “Chisholm ‘72: Unbought and Unbossed” is in competition this year, puts it: “Most documentary filmmakers write grants. It’s not a pitch, a schmooze, so that levels the playing field. And since there’s not as much money involved, people are more willing to lend it.”

Nevins is at pains to point out that the documentary form is more than just a calling card or fallback position when narrative filmmaking isn’t possible. Jessica Yu, whose documentary “In the Realms of the Unreal” is in competition and who won a documentary short Oscar (“Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien”), agrees: “To see that as a steppingstone [to feature films] would be insulting to the subject,” she says.

In fact, few women documentarians end up directing narrative films, even when they’re successful. The most obvious exception is Shari Springer Berman, a documentarian who co-directed “American Splendor.” Another exception is two-time documentary Oscar winner Barbara Kopple (“Harlan County, U.S.A.,” “American Dream”), who is finishing her first narrative feature, “Havoc,” but has two documentaries in production and insists that that’s where her heart is.

Nevins believes the appeal of documentaries for women goes way beyond just making them. Documentaries present unvarnished reality and a corrective to the way women are usually depicted onscreen, with their breast implants and obligatory love interests.

“The way women are portrayed [in feature films] is such crap,” says Abby Epstein, whose documentary “Until the Violence Stops” is a special screening. “You see so little truth. It’s either a caricature or misogynistic.”

Documentaries also offer women an avenue for personal filmmaking. In fact, Nevins is a producer on Ivy Meeropol’s competition film, “Heir to an Execution,” about the execution of convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Meeropol, the Rosenbergs’ granddaughter, says it was hard to get investors to commit to the project, but Nevins expressed interest in part because she marched in New York 50 years ago with her mother and carried a sign that read “Please Don’t Kill the Rosenbergs.” “It [the film] represents her mother,” Meeropol says.

It’s also explicitly a film with an agenda. And here is where the discussion about why there are so many female documentarians gets murkier and arguably sexist, as talk turns to what they do and why they do it. Generally speaking -- and everyone quoted here emphasizes that they are speaking generally -- women are interested in the social issues that documentaries are uniquely able to address and women excel at the skills and demands that documentaries require.

“Docs are more substantive and women are more substantive,” says veteran documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, who is a documentary judge at Sundance this year. Kennedy adds that it may be no coincidence that the executives at HBO, Showtime, WNET, VH1, TLC, and Lifetime who greenlight documentary projects are all women. Documentarian Catherine Tambini says that when she attended a Sundance feature film producers’ conference, it was nearly all men. A similar conference for documentary producers was nearly all women.

“Women want to communicate, and men want to make money,” Kopple says. This is a common sentiment. Women do jobs that men won’t do because they don’t pay well enough. Kopple also observes that women’s interest in documentaries -- certainly her own -- began with the social upheavals of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Another cliche that gets bandied about is that women are empathic and are therefore able to disarm their subjects or get them to open up. Clearly this is the case with female-oriented subjects such as Briski’s prostitutes, Lesli Klainberg and Gini Reticker’s female filmmakers in “In the Company of Women” (another documentary special presentation) and Lynch’s Shirley Chisholm.

But filmmakers Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson say that being women worked to their advantage in the male-dominated world of “Deadline” (a competition doc), which deals with death row inmates, lawyers and legislators. And Tambini, who, with Carlos Sandoval, co-directed the competition doc “Farmingville,” about illegal immigrants, says being a woman helped her overcome their natural resistance to being interviewed.

Director Paola di Florio, whose competition documentary “Home of the Brave” is about a murdered civil rights worker, says that slipping into the skins of her subjects -- one of whom is a paranoid survivalist-type -- is very similar to what she once did as an actress.

A kind of corollary to this is that women’s films are sensitive and passionate, qualities that appeal to documentary audiences. Sundance programming head Geoff Gilmore, who’s not comfortable making generalities of any sort, disagrees with this one but has to cite exceptions to it from the feature film world.

“Is Kevin Smith [“Clerks”] a personal filmmaker?” Gilmore asks. “I’d say he is. And so is Sofia Coppola [“Lost in Translation”].”

“You’re making women seem cuddly,” Nevins says. “You’re stereotyping them. I’m trying to think of a crybaby male film ... ‘My Flesh and Blood,’ ‘My Architect.’ ” The former was directed by Jonathan Karsh, about the adoptive mother of 11 special-needs kids, the latter by Nathaniel Kahn, about the filmmaker coming to terms with his dead father.

Another classically female virtue that lends itself to documentary filmmaking is multitasking. Documentarians have to wear a million hats. Some compare it to motherhood. Epstein says that on her film she was trying to get antibiotics for her (male) cameraman, who came down with tick fever in Guatemala, while juggling interview subjects and plane tickets. Whether multitasking is really a female trait, the fact is that documentaries are one of the few places in the film world where women can exercise it.

Which brings up another issue: control.

Documentary filmmaking is collegial, nonhierarchical. Many women find the give and take and small crews appealing. Kennedy says she can think of many female-male and female-female teams but few male-male teams, other than the Maysles brothers.

Another stereotype about control is that women let things happen. The making of some, though not all, documentaries is dictated by the passage of time and the behavior of the subjects. The filmmaker has to surrender him or herself to a story with an uncertain plot and outcome. Briski, who spent 2 1/2 years in Calcutta brothels, says that she had to remind her more proactive partner (and ex-boyfriend) Ross Kauffman to be patient.

Whatever the validity of these generalities and however committed these documentarians are to what they do, the discussion always seems to return to the real-world situation of women, which filmmaking mirrors. Epstein tells of a meeting of Sundance documentary directors intended to prepare them for the festival -- dealing with publicists, the press, the buyers. Epstein says that when she walked in, she said, “Oh, my God, we’re all women.” To which one of her colleagues replied, “Of course. It’s the hardest work and the least paid.”