The main prize of the German Documentary Film Prize 2021 goes to the Swedish director Nathan Grossman for his film "Ich bin Greta".
The award for a German-language documentary film with the highest endowment of twenty thousand euros recognizes the fact that Grossman's film has a strong focus on the person of Greta Thunberg, but it is precisely in this concentration that it shows “that it is about something very big - namely nothing less than the future of humanity ”, announced the Südwestrundfunk on Friday evening in
Baden-Baden.
Grossmann accompanied the environmental activist Thunberg from the very
beginning, without knowing how well known she would one day become, as the jury of the SWR Doku Festival explained on the occasion of the virtual award ceremony. The film begins with the visible school strike of the then fifteen-year-olds in front of the Swedish parliament and lets viewers experience Thunberg's path from the activist's personal perspective.
The “Lifetime Achievement Award”, which goes to Georg Stefan Troller, was awarded for the first time at the SWR Doku Festival. "The now 99-year-old has created great works for print, TV and radio for almost a century and has had a significant impact on German television," said the jury's statement. Troller's way of narrating has become a role model for many journalists. In response to the laudation, Troller says that this award for his more than 150 films also replaces the 30 or so awards that cleaning staff had "disposed of" when he retired
and temporarily stored them in a box in his former office
. The award is the recognition that he, as a native Austrian who had to flee from the Nazis, had always wished for in Germany.
Alison Kuhn received the five thousand euro prize for art and culture for “The Case you” for the story of five actresses who experienced systematic sexual and violent assaults in the film industry. Wiebke Pöpel also received the music prize of five thousand euros for her film "Helmut Lachenmann - My Way" about the life of the composer Helmut Lachenmann.
Michael Kranz's
“What to do” was
awarded both the House of Documentary Film's advancement award, endowed with three thousand euros, and the new audience award of the State Show in the same amount. According to the information, Kranz went looking for a young woman in Bangladesh whom Michael Glawogger had portrayed seven years earlier as a fifteen-year-old forced prostitute.