RTL Group | Potsdam, 10/10/2024

'Ich bin! Margot Friedländer' Wins Another Award

On Tuesday, the 40th Robert Geisendörfer Prize was awarded at Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hamburg. "Ich bin! Margot Friedländer," a production by UFA Documentary for ZDF, was honored in the Television category: Hannah Ley (author) and Raymond Ley (author and director) received the award. Besides "Ich bin! Margot Friedländer," seven other productions were honored with the media prize given out by the Protestant Church. "Margot Friedländer survived the Holocaust and returned to Berlin from America. And she speaks out as an admonisher against growing anti-Semitism and for humanity," note the judges in their tribute. "Raymond and Hannah Ley's docudramatic portrait film 'Ich bin! Margot Friedländer' is an outstandingly successful memorial to her. A very lively, very personal memorial - and an eminently important film." A joint statement by Hannah Ley, author, and Raymond Lee, author and director, reads: "We should always make more than films - with which we try to feed and assuage our moral outrage on anniversaries and memorial days. People often say that films like 'Ich bin! Margot Friedländer' are more important now than ever before. When were they ever unimportant? When was the horrific fate of the six million murdered ever unimportant? We should listen to Margot Friedländer - hear how she struggles with her memories, how she tries to explain them to us. And yet we can only look in horror at what happened back then. We cannot comprehend it." By the end of September, the docudrama had already won two German Television Awards, Best Television Film/Multi-part, and Best Montage Fiction for editor Martin Menzel. In the documentary, Margot Friedländer, a contemporary witness of the Nazi regime and survivor of the Holocaust, tells her life story.