The18th International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) ended on an upbeatnote at the weekend with the award of the Joris Ivens prize to MyGrandmother's House, from Spanish director AdanAliaga.

Anintimate study of the relationship between a grandmother and her grandchild,the film is sold by Madrid-based Kevin Williams Associates.

IDFA'sSpecial Jury Award went to Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Our Daily Bread, about modern food production methods.

Thiswas also a title that whetted buyers' appetites, securing a US theatrical dealwith First Run/Icarus Films. Vienna-based sales agent Peter Jager of AutlookFilms went on to close deals South Korea and Finland.

Otherprizewinners included Astrid Bussnik, who picked up the First Appearance awardfor Angelmakers, her morbid yarn about agroup of Hungarian housewives who murdered their husbands with arsenic in thelate 1920s, and Arunas Matelis who won the Silver Wolf Award for BeforeFlying Back To The Earth.

Formany IDFA attendees, the focus has been on business. Over the past 10 days,filmmakers, commissioning editors, sales agents and buyers have crammed in theusual vast numbers into the Balie coffee house, the social and deal-making hubof the festival.

Thisyear's event was given an added boost by the presence of two major US companieson the lookout for feature docs.

Participant,the company set up last year by ebay tycoon Jeff Skoll, recently launched afeature documentary arm under Diane Weyermann (ex-Sundance Institute).

Weyermannwas at IDFA looking for projects that might complement Participant's fictionslate (Goodnight, and Good Luck, Syriana etc.)

Alsoin town for the first time was US broadcaster CourtTV, which has launched itsown feature doc division and was seeking partners for Marc Levin's $1 millionproject, Liz Holtzman - Nazi Hunter.

Titlessparking interest in IDFA's Docs for Sale sidebar included Gitmo (about Guantanamo Bay) and Guerrilla Girl (shot in a FARC guerrilla camp in Colombia). Both are backed byZentropa.

The Forum,IDFA's pitching market for new projects, yielded several titles which excitedthe buyers, among them Democracy Business, thelatest endeavour from arch-pranksters and anti-globalists, The Yes Men. Alsowarmly received was British director Nigel Williams' Dance With A SerialKiller, a BBC-backed whodunnit about how a brilliant Frenchpolice officer tracked down and arrested a psychopathic serial killer.

Meanwhile, many expressed concern that documentarymakers are becoming too obsessed with the feature length format and losingtouch with the needs of the broadcasters who underwrite their work.

The tension between the needs of broadcasters and filmdistributors was illustrated by the case of Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight which, it emerged, had been disqualified from Oscar contention becauseit had received a single, late-night screening on the BBC.