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The OPC begins a closer look at its award winners with the 2013 Edward R. Murrow Award. Associated Producers Ltd. for HBO Documentary Films team Ric Esther Bienstock, Felix Golubev, Simcha Jacobovici, Sheila Nevins and Nancy Abraham won the Murrow Award for the documentary “Tales from the Organ Trade.”
The judges wrote about the film: In the finest tradition of Edward R. Murrow, this documentary challenges everything you thought you knew about the illegal trade in kidneys and the international campaign to stop it. Through interviews with donors, recipients, go-betweens, doctors and prosecutors from North America to Israel and Eastern Europe to the Philippines, the filmmakers provide a rare look at how an illegally acquired kidney reaches a sick person and how both desperation and good will drive the trade.
“Sometime the story isn’t what you set out to do,” Ric Esther Bienstock said in her acceptance speech in April. “Every 60 minutes an organ is sold on the black market and chances are, it’s a kidney. This story forced me to question my own moral and ethical assumptions.”
Tales from the Organ Trade, which took three years to make and filmed in eight countries, was part of the HBO documentaries series. The film has won numerous awards and went to eight awards fesitvals.
The 2013 OPC Award is the second Edward R. Murrow Award Ric Esther Bienstock has won. She was the recipient of the 2006 OPC Award for “Sex Slaves” on PBS Frontline.