"Audiences are really looking for more in-depth examinations of subjects that affect their lives," distinguished actor, director and producer Robert Redford said in an exclusive interview with MIPTV News.

"News channels cycle stories in and out so quickly that the public rarely has enough information to fully digest all of the aspects of a given story.

"Documentary films offer viewers a chance to absorb a great deal more information about a subject or issue," said Redford, a co-owner of influential USA documentary programmer, Sundance Channel.

This thirst to understand the many natural and "unnatural" disasters that have rocked the world in recent years has propelled such documentaries to the top of the list of programmes on offer at the MIPDOC fair over the weekend.

The two-day show precedes the week-long "MIPTV featuring MILIA" international audiovisual entertainment show that opened its doors in southern Cannes on Monday.

"Disasters are currently very much in demand" with TV audiences, Christian Massmann, head of sales at Germany's ZDF, told the MIPDOC conference.

Recent movie box office hits such as Michael Moore's ground-breaking "Fahrenheit 9/11" have also showed there is a real audience and a demand for documentaries as a cinematic experience.

But in order to sustain this demand, "we need to continue to produce films that reach people in a profound way. Either polemically or, as in the case of a film like 'March Of The Penguins', on an emotional level," Jacques Bensimon, from the National Film Board of Canada, said.

Many of the factual powerful films and series here that will be broadcast around the world later this year try to make sense of the apocalyptic nature of recent major news events.

These include a new National Geographic series about Hurricane Katrina and films about the October 2005 Pakistan earthquake, international terrorism, the Iraq war, global warming and AIDS.

But it is the 2004 tsunami disaster that has captured the attention of the most filmmakers with several documentaries vying to catch the eye of the hundreds of programme buyers in town for the event.

These include Singapore MediaCorp's "The Orphans, The Childless And The Predators", narrated by Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon, that focuses on the thousands who lost parents and children in the South Asian tsunami.

In the "Island Of A Thousand Mosques", the programme looks at why so many of Aceh's mosques managed to survive the giant wave, which claimed more than 220,000 lives around the region.

The tsunami is also the background to the Netherlands-based NPB Sales' "Ayla, The Tsunami Girl", a short documentary about an 11-year-old caught up in the tragedy while on holiday in Sri Lanka.

Powerful historical docudramas combining drama with historical re-enactments that have been riding high over the last few years are still big crowd pullers and help attract younger viewers, according to Canada's John Gill.

But of the 1,192 factual films and documentaries on offer here at this year's bumper show, 18 percent focused on current affairs, highlighting how the genre is catching the TV public's attention.

They nudged big budget history and civilization factual shows into second place at 17 percent. Art, music and culture shows came in third accounting for 13 percent whilst nature and wildlife dropped down into sixth place with eight percent.

Even most wildlife documentaries, which were at the heart of the market for some 40 years, now usually include a conservation angle, industry experts underlined.

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