It's a sure sign that the euphoria of the dotcom phase is passing when documentary films are being made about Internet companies once seen as high fliers that have gone bust.

In the past few months, two feature-length documentaries have been released that highlight the optimistic expectations of some young dotcom founders who dreamed of untold wealth but watched helplessly as their companies and dreams were crushed by the stock market crash.

One of these films, e-dreams, was written, produced and directed by Mr Wonsuk Chin.

He followed two KoreanAmericans who founded a company called Kozmo.com. It offered online shopping with onehour delivery.

Mr Joseph Park, Kozmo chief executive, and Mr Yong Kang, president, left their jobs at investment banks to start the company, which they named after their favourite drink and a character in TV series Seinfeld.

They set up offices in an east village warehouse in Manhattan.

When Mr Chin began filming, the duo had $28 million (€33 million) in capital and had just moved to new headquarters. "Frankly, I didn't know much about the dotcom industry when I started e-dreams," Mr Chin said in an interview.

"That might have been why I wanted to make a movie about a dotcom.

"Kozmo.com appealed to me because not only was it one of the fastest-growing companies at the time but also it had a unique business.

"The fact that some of the bike messengers were also shareholders appealed to me."

Kozmo.com promised to instantly deliver anything from pizzas to beer to medication to adult videos once a customer purchased the products online.

Kozmo.com's bike messengers became familiar sights on the streets of Manhattan, with their trademark orange helmets and jackets with a green "running man" logo.

In the beginning, a core group of founders built the website and made deliveries themselves. In less than one year, Kozmo grew from 10 employees to 3,000.

Two years later, the company was operating in 10 cities in the United States and had received $280 million in capital from investors, which included Amazon.com, Starbucks Coffee, Sony and Flatiron Partners.

When Mr Park founded the venture he thought he would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But the sharp change in investor sentiment forced the company to pull plans for an initial public offering (IPO) and some further bad luck led to his resignation in July last year.

After several rounds of layoffs, the company folded in April. "At the time I took on the project, nobody thought the entire dotcom industry would collapse," Mr Chin said.

"Everyone expected Kozmo to have one of the biggest IPOs. TheGlobe.com had the biggest IPO in 1998 but its stock had gone downhill since its IPO. I focused the movie on the absurdly rapid rise and abrupt fall."

The world premiere of e- dreams, which had a low budget, took place on April 26th at the Walter Reade Theater in New York city as part of Independents Night.

The film was first shown in Asia at the Jeonju International Film Festival in Korea on May 2nd and this month it will find a West Coast audience at the Seattle International Film Festival.

While Mr Chin said he thought Kozmo was "a very compelling business model", he believed it could have worked better "if they executed it well".

In addition, he said, "maybe they shouldn't have expanded so quickly. Maybe they shouldn't have raised so much money."

When asked why he thought Kozmo.com failed, Mr Chin replied: "Honestly, I have no idea. Maybe it's because it didn't work as a business. During the dotcom frenzy, no-one seemed to care about profitability. Many have forgotten the fundamentals. I believe Kozmo was a victim of its own hype."

Another documentary that follows the rise and fall of a dotcom company is currently playing in limited release in Manhattan. Startup.com, produced by D.A. Pennebaker and co-directed by Chris Hegedus with Jehane Noujaim, follows an Internet start-up called govworks.com, which also went out of business.

The site's plan was to connect people to their local, state and federal governments to transact business directly - for example, to pay a parking ticket online. Not only did govworks.com struggle financially but the business played havoc with the friendship of the two founders, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, best friends since childhood.