Sao Paulo: Documentary films, it was once thought, should be neutral windows on the world, objective investigations brought to the big screen. But not any more -- not in our world of YouTube home videos and Michael Moore polemics and reality TV and feature narratives that borrow heavily from true stories.

Now, the documentary genre is getting personal. That is the trend seen this week at one of the biggest documentary showcases in the world: the "It's All True" festival taking place in Brazil. Earnest staples of traditional sort still feature strongly in the line-up, which, while heavy with Brazilian fare, also has many foreign entries.

Among them is "Darfur Now," a look at the crisis in western Sudan from a distinctly Los Angeles perspective (actor Don Cheadle is a producer and trains the camera briefly on buddy George Clooney as they lobby on the issue).

There is also a French examination of the women who wait to see their husbands in prison in "The Other Side of the Wall" ("A Cote"); a Chinese woman's recollection of the 1949 Cultural Revolution in "Fengming: A Chinese Memoir," and "Anna, Seven Years on the Frontline," about Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist shot dead in Moscow in 2006.

But two films creating a buzz were US documentaries in which the filmmakers were inextricably caught up in the subjects they covered. Cindy Kleine was nervous as she followed the crowd into a Sao Paulo movie theater for the first-ever public screening of "Phyllis and Harold," about her domineering self- satisfied father and her mother who never revealed to him a years-long extramarital love affair that coloured her whole life.