Arthur Cohn(1927-2025)

Arthur Cohn is an independent film producer and has won six Academy Awards, more than any other independent producer in film history. Cohn was born in Basel, Switzerland. His father was Dr. Marcus Cohn, a lawyer and leader of the Swiss Zionist movement who saved many Jews during WWII from within Switzerland. Cohn's mother was Rose Galewski, a German-Jewish poet from Berlin. After high school Arthur Cohn became a journalist and a reporter for Swiss Radio, covering soccer and ice hockey games, as well as the Middle East, which he wrote three books about. He shifted from journalist writing to script writing very early on, but soon found his passion in supervising other scripts and producing movies. His first film production, The Sky Above, the Mud Below (1961), about an expedition through unmapped territory in West Papua, earned him his first Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. From 1967 to 1973 he worked closely with his friend and mentor Vittorio De Sica and produced six of the latter's last films, among them The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), an epic about the fate of a Jewish family in fascist Italy, which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Other Cohn- de Sica collaborations include: Woman Times Seven (1967), starring Shirley MacLaine, Peter Sellers, Alan Arkin, Michael Caine and Anita Ekberg; A Place for Lovers (1968), with Faye Dunaway and Marcello Mastroianni; Sunflower (1970), with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni; We'll Call Him Andrea (1972) and A Brief Vacation (1973). After the de Sica era, Cohn preferred working with young and inexperienced directors, always maintaining his right for the final cut. Two collaborations with then-unknown French directors Jean-Jacques Annaud and Richard Dembo got him two other Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film: Black and White in Color (1976), a satire on French Colonialists, and Dangerous Moves (1984), a psychological thriller between two Chess champions in the communist era. Cohn has always kept his passion for documentary film-making. His account on the holocaust The Yellow Star: The Persecution of the Jews in Europe - 1933-1945 (1981) earned him an Academy Award nomination. Ten years later he would win his fifth Academy Award, his second in the category of Best Documentary Feature, for American Dream (1990), an account of a six-month strike at Hormel in Austin, Minnesota. In the Nineties he produced Two Bits (1995), with Al Pacino in the lead, and White Lies (1997), starring Rosanna Arquette and Harvey Fierstein. In 1998 he began his collaboration with Brazilian director Walter Salles, with whom he made two critically acclaimed films: Central Station (1998), which earned Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actress in a Leading Role (Fernanda Montenegro), as well as Behind the Sun (2001). In between he received an Academy Award for the sixth time, his third in the category of Best Documentary Feature, for One Day in September (1999), a shocking account of the murder of eleven Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. In 2004 Cohn reunited with his colleague Jacques Perrin, with whom he had already collaborated in L'adoption (1979), to co-produce the French box-office hit The Chorus (2004), which got Academy Award nominations for Best Foreign Language Film and for Best Achievement in Music (Original Song). In 2008 he produced the road-movie The Yellow Handkerchief (2008), set in post-Katrina Louisiana, starring William Hurt, Kristen Stewart, Eddie Redmayne and Maria Bello. In the same year he produced the war epic The Children of Huang Shi (2008), set in occupied China of 1937 and based on the true life story of British journalist George Hogg, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. In 2012 he produced the German comedy Russendisko (2012), based on the bestseller of Wladimir Kaminer. In 2018 his newest production The Etruscan Smile (2018), based on the bestseller of José Luis Sampedro, premiered in Berlin, Germany, to wide acclaim and went on to win top prizes of both jury and audience at several film festivals in the USA and Canada. The film stars Brian Cox in the lead, along impressive performances by JJ Feild, Thora Birch, Rosanna Arquette, Treat Williams, Tim Matheson, Peter Coyote and Emanuel Cohn. Cohn divides his time between Basel and Los Angeles and is regarded as a hands-on producer who is strongly involved with the development of the script until the final touches of the editing process. Besides the cinematic prizes of his film productions, Arthur Cohn was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1992, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 1995, the Humanitarian Award by the National Board of Review in 2001, the Guardian of Zion Award in 2004 as well as the UNESCO Award in 2005. Cohn is recipient of multiple honorary degrees, from Boston University (1998), Yeshiva University (2001) and the University of Basel (2006). He is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Film Festivals in Chicago (1992), Jerusalem (1995), Shanghai (1999) and Haifa (2016). In February 2019 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cinema for Peace-Foundation in Berlin and in November 2019 from the Israel Film Festival in Los Angeles. Arthur Cohn's films have been shown in many retrospectives around the world.