atching Jean-Xavier de Lestrade's documentary "Murder on a Sunday Morning," you wonder how he got access to shoot as freely as he did. An account of a murder trial in Jacksonville, Fla., the film persistently stays in the faces of the 15-year-old defendant, Brenton Butler (who was acquitted), and his family; the dogged defense team; the prosecutor; and detectives assigned to the case.

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The filmmakers had long discussions with Judge Waddell Wallace of the Duval County Circuit Court about camera access, said Denis Poncet, the documentary's producer, in an e-mail message from France: "It was his ruling alone after the Florida Supreme Court told him he could do what he wanted. He decided to agree with our proposals because we were making a film to be broadcast months after the trial. Even though the prosecution tried to kick us out, the judge always sided with us. We thank him."

The documentary, which won an Oscar in 2002, is scheduled for release on Tuesday on DVD and VHS by Docurama, a division of New Video, a New York company. Docurama distributes nothing but documentaries, and with a growing supply of them coming from film festivals and cable outlets like HBO, A&E, the Independent Film Channel and the Sundance Channel, the release schedule has more than doubled from 12 titles in 2002 to 29 scheduled for this year.

Docurama titles include "Southern Comfort," Kate Davis's acclaimed film about Robert Eads, a female-to-male transsexual dying of cervical and ovarian cancer and being neglected by doctors uncomfortable with treating him; and Scott J. Gill's "Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy," about a performer who values acting as much as sexual skill (released last month).

Susan Margolin, New Video's chief operating officer, said that mobile digital video has helped open the documentary floodgates. For example, "Murder on a Sunday Morning" got around Jacksonville and Judge Wallace's courtroom with a Sony DSR 500, a digital video camcorder.

Steve Savage, New Video's president, said that, in a way, documentaries had become the same sort of haven for young filmmakers as independent films generally were in the early 1990's before studios absorbed much of that movement.

Docurama titles like "Southern Comfort" travel the festival circuit and slowly build an audience. "If there was ever a movie that deserved the credit `a film by,' it is the documentary `Southern Comfort,' which was mostly made with a one-person crew, its director Kate Davis," Elvis Mitchell wrote in The New York Times. The film, released by HBO Theatrical Documentary Presentations, showed at Film Forum in Manhattan.

Mr. Savage and Ms. Margolin recently returned from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C., which is a gathering place for the tightknit documentary-making community. The Web site D-Word (www.d-word.com) is another. At that site one finds a definition: "Industry euphemism for documentary (as in: 'We love your film but we don't know how to sell it. It's a d-word.')." Increasingly, it seems, the scene is brightening.

New Video Releases

Bloody Sunday

"If we don't march, civil rights is dead in this city," says Ivan Cooper (James Nesbitt, left), a Protestant member of Parliament representing an Irish-Catholic district in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. March they did on a Sunday in 1972, to be met by British troops who killed 13 and wounded scores more among the 15,000 pro-Irish Republican Army demonstrators. Paul Greengrass's magnetic and impassioned melodrama "presents the attitudes and the events leading to the horrible clash with a tense, self-aware propulsion — it's like a Brechtian newsreel," Elvis Mitchell wrote in The New York Times.

2002. Paramount. VHS, $95.99; DVD, $29.99. 110 minutes. Closed captioned. R.

The Believer

A clever Yeshiva student, Danny Balint (Ryan Gosling), grows up to hate Judaism and become a neo-Nazi. But then that bores him so he decides to be a Jew and a Nazi simultaneously. Henry Bean's film wraps unnerving sacrilege and religious desire with Mr. Gosling's muscular performance and the cinematographer Jim Denault's visual punch, but the movie assaults far better than it illuminates. "Neither Danny's rage nor his eventual reconciliation is given real dimension or insight," (Julie Salamon).

2002. Palm Pictures. VHS, $44.99; DVD, $24.99. 99 minutes. No rating.

Things Behind the Sun

Allison Anders's semiautobiographical film follows a talented, heavy-drinking rock singer named Sherry (Kim Dickens) who sleeps with whomever. She eventually comes to understand how her rape by a gang of neighborhood boys when she was 14 has scarred her and is sabotaging a career about to take off. Don Cheadle gives a fine performance as her manager and former lover, but others are less convincing in a film that "lurches along, without either a swift narrative pull or the leisure to sink into individual scenes" (Caryn James).

2001. Showtime. VHS, $19.98; DVD, $24.98. 124 minutes. R.

Drumline

At the fictitious Atlanta A&T University and its real-life crosstown rival, Morris Brown College, a football game is little more than an excuse to watch the fierce competition between the school's marching bands. Charles Stone III's film throws in a story that is nearly as crowded as the field at halftime. Devon Miles (Nick Cannon), a talented, rebellious young drummer, stirs up plenty of problems on the way to a showdown that "tops the rap battle at the end of '8 Mile' for suspense and inventiveness" (A. O. Scott).

2002. Fox. VHS, $19.98; DVD, $27.98. 119 minutes. Closed captioned. PG-13.

Straight to Video

Other new titles of interest, some of which may have had a theater release, appeared on television or been on videocassette or DVD in earlier editions.

THE SINGING DETECTIVE. In the boiling six-part BBC series, the writer Dennis Potter "stretched a distressed medium as far as it would go," wrote a British critic, certainly too far for all but 23 PBS stations when shown in this country in 1988. Michael Gambon is Potter's turbulent, painfully afflicted mystery writer Philip E. Marlow. The director Jon Amiel contributes a commentary, and Potter is interviewed. 2002. BBC. DVD, $59.98, three discs. 450 minutes.

THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY. A five-disc set adds four hours to the 1995 ABC special, which served as the authorized version of the oft-told Beatles' history, and stirs in a raft of new anecdotes, stories, recollections, looks and sounds. 2002. EMI. DVD, $79.98. 600 minutes.

FUTURAMA, VOLUME I. "I sold the show by saying, `This is the Simpsons in the future,' " Matt Groening said in 1999 about his creation — then new, now defunct — that was built around a pizza delivery boy named Fry who is cryogenically frozen for the next 1,000 years. Too bad the characters lacked the bite of their predecessors, but Fry and friends are great fun nevertheless. 2003. Fox. DVD, $39.98, three discs. 299 minutes.