Ulrich Gregor, the founder and former director of the Forum will be in conversation with French documentary filmmaker and producer Claude Lanzmann today who is being honoured with a Homage and awarded the Honorary Golden Bear for his lifetime achievement at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival. The German premiere of Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half hour documentary on the genocide of European Jews SHOAH, which mad cinematic history as an unparalleled masterpiece of commemorative culture was screened in the Berlinale Forum in 1986.

Born in Paris in 1925 to Jewish parents, Claude Lanzmann fought in the Résistance, studied philosophy in France and Germany, and held a lectureship at the then newly founded Freie Universität Berlin in 1948/49. He was an active supporter of the Algerian independence movement in the early 1960s.His exploration of the Shoah, antisemitism and political struggles for freedom infuse both his cinematic and journalistic work. His first cinematic work was made in 1972, the documentary POURQUOI ISRAEL (ISRAEL; WHY France 1973), in which he illustrates the necessity of Israel's founding from the Jewish perspective. In the film TSAHAL which screened in the 1995 Forum, he focuses on women and men who serve in the Israeli Army. SOBIBOR, 14 OCTOBRE 1943, 16 HEURES (France 2001), about the 1943 revolt in the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, was also screened in the Forum, in 2002.