Arthur Cohn
Birth : 1927-02-04, Basel, Switzerland
History
Arthur Cohn (born February 4, 1927) is a film producer and a multiple Academy Award winner.
Cohn was born to a Jewish family, the son of Marcus Cohn, a lawyer and leader of the Swiss Zionist movement who moved to Israel in 1949 where he helped to write many of the basic laws of the new state and served as Israel’s assistant attorney-general. Cohn's mother, Rose Cohn-Galewski, was a Jewish-German poet from Berlin. Cohn's grandfather, Arthur Cohn, was the first chief rabbi of Basel. After completing high school, Cohn became a journalist and a reporter for Swiss Radio, covering the Middle East as well as soccer and ice hockey games. He shifted from journalist writing to script writing, but soon found his passion in film production.
Six of his films have won the Academy Award, three in the category of Best Foreign Language Film and three in the category of Best Documentary Feature. 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. He is a multiple honorary degree recipient from Boston University (1998), Yeshiva University (2001) and the University of Basel (2006) and Bar-Ilan University (2021). Cohn has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Chicago International Film Festival (1992), the Shanghai International Film Festival (1999), as well as from the International Film Festivals in Jerusalem (1995) and Haifa (2016). In 2019 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cinema for Peace-Foundation in Berlin. 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. For decades he was assisted by Lillian Birnbaum (Paris) and Pierre Rothschild (Zurich). Arthur Cohn's films have been shown at many retrospectives around the world.
His best-known fictional film is The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970, directed by Vittorio De Sica). He also produced films by Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September) and Walter Salles (Central Station, Behind the Sun).
Source: Article "Arthur Cohn" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Producer
About young British journalist, George Hogg, who with the assistance of a courageous Australian nurse, saves a group of orphaned children during the Japanese occupation of China in 1937.
Producer
Set in 1940s France, a new teacher at a school for disruptive boys gives hope and inspiration.
Self
While silent-film star Charlie Chaplin may have charmed American audiences with the onscreen antics of his lovable "Tramp" character, the actor's private life was marred by a series of public scandals that eventually pushed him into exile. In addition to his penchant for much younger women, Chaplin was unjustly hounded by Senator Joe McCarthy's notorious anti-Communist witch hunts, for which the U.S. revoked his visa in 1952. A bitter and disenchanted Chaplin responded by moving his family to Switzerland, where he remained until his death in 1977. This documentary chronicles Chaplin's life and career during those so-called "forgotten years" (during which he became a prolific and highly respected film-score composer) through previously unreleased archival footage and intimate interviews with his friends and family, including his children Geraldine, Michael, and Eugene.
Producer
The full story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and the Israeli revenge operation 'Wrath of God.' The 1972 Munich Olympics were interrupted by Palestinian terrorists taking Israeli athletes hostage. Besides footage taken at the time, we see interviews with the surviving terrorist, Jamal Al Gashey, and various officials detailing exactly how the police, lacking an anti-terrorist squad and turning down help from the Israelis, botched the operation.
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An emotive journey of a former school teacher, who writes letters for illiterate people, and a young boy, whose mother has just died, as they search for the father he never knew.
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A museum worker pretends to be an artist in order to impress women. When an attractive assistant director of a SoHo art gallery overhears him, she offers to exhibit his work. He plays along, which leads to a series of complications following his newfound double life. He starts falling in love with the assistant director, but her art critic fiancé grows suspicious.
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It's a hot summer day in 1933 in South Philly, where 12-year old Gennaro lives with his widowed mom and his ailing grandpa, who sits outside holding tight to his last quarter, which he's promised to Gennaro and which Gennaro would like to have to buy a ticket to the plush new movie theater. But grandpa's not ready to pass on the quarter or pass on to his final reward: he has some unfinished business with a woman from his past, and he enlists Gennaro to act as his emissary.
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Marcel Ophüls interviews various important Eastern European figures for their thoughts on the reunification of Germany and the fall of Communism.
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When workers at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota are asked to take a substantial pay cut in a highly profitable year, the local labor union decides to go on strike and fight for a wage they believe is fair. But as the work stoppage drags on and the strikers face losing everything, friends become enemies, families are divided and the very future of this typical mid American town is threatened.
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A fashionable playwright-director offers roles to two young actresses. Shortly after accepting, the actresses notice strange clauses in their contract – namely they must live at the director’s large appartment during rehearsals. Soon thereafter, the mysteries, hallucinations and rivalries begin.
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World Chess Champion Akiva Liebskind (Michel Piccoli) faces his former pupil Pavius Fromm (Alexandre Arbatt), who defected to the West from the Soviet Union five years earlier, for the World Chess Championship in Geneva, Switzerland. The tension and strategies between the players draw parallels to the political conflicts and ideologies between East and West during the Cold War.
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A couple takes on a homeless teenager. The trio forms a family-like community that seems to work extremely informally and without many regulations. But then the harmonic situation escalates as the boy falls in love with his "adoptive mother".
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French colonists in Africa, several months behind in the news, find themselves at war with their German neighbors. Deciding that they must do their proper duty and fight the Germans, they promptly conscript the local native population. Issuing them boots and rifles, the French attempt to make "proper" soldiers out of the Africans. A young, idealistic French geographer seems to be the only rational person in the town, and he takes over control of the "war" after several bungles on the part of the others.
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Forced to support herself, her children, her physically incapacitated husband and her obtrusive brother and mother, a downtrodden working woman contracts tuberculosis. She is granted a brief vacation at a health spa, where a whole new world — and potential new life — is opened up to her.
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Paolo and Maria are two elementary teachers, who love each other, but can not have a child.
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In late 1930s Ferrara, Italy, the Finzi-Continis are a leading family: wealthy, aristocratic, and urbane; they are also Jewish. Their adult children, Micol and Alberto, gather a diverse circle of friends for tennis and parties at their villa with its lovely grounds, and try to keep the rest of the world at bay. But tensions between them all grow as anti-Semitism rises in Fascist Italy, and even the Finzi-Continis will have to confront the Holocaust.
Producer
At the end of World War II, Giovanna, a war bride living near Milan refuses to accept that her husband, Antonio, missing on the Russian front, is dead. There's a flashback to their brief courtship near her hometown of Naples, his 12-day leave to marry her, ruses to keep from deployment, and the ultimate farewell. Some years after the war, still with no word from Antonio, Giovanna goes to Russia to find him, starting in the town near the winter battle when he disappeared. Armed with his photograph, what will she find?
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Globe-trotting clothes-horse Julia, who's harboring a secret, embarks on a 10-day fling with Valerio in Italy.
Producer
Seven mini-stories of adultery: "Funeral Possession," a wayward widow at her husband's funeral; "Amateur Night," angry wife becomes streetwalker out of revenge; "Two Against One," seemingly prudish girl turns out otherwise; "Super Simone," wife vainly attempts to divert her over-engrossed writer husband; "At the Opera," a battle over a supposedly exclusive dress; "Suicides," a death pact; "Snow," would-be suitor is actually a private detective hired by jealous husband.
Producer
In September, 1959, six Europeans leave Cook's Bay on the southern coast of Dutch New Guinea, now West Papua or Irian Jaya, to trek north to the far side of the island. The journey (450 miles, as a crow flies) across unmapped territory took seven months; three Muyu porters died. Near both coasts, the expedition met villagers who invited them to observe rituals and live with them. In the interior, all villagers kept them at bay, and they depended on air lifts from Hollandia for food and supplies. They climbed above 10,000 feet, built 14 bridges, and fought leeches and malaria. The narrator focuses on describing Stone Age savages, headhunters, and cannibals.
Story
When a large forest fire breaks out in the mountains of Montana, a squad of 'Smoke Jumpers', the paratroop-corps of fire-fighters in the U. S. Forest Service, is flown to the scene from their regional headquarters in Missoula, Montana. The Forest Rangers, under Cliff Mason, put out the blaze, but several of the fire-fighters are killed. Ed Miller, son of one of the dead rangers, thinks he died because Mason was a coward, and sets out to prove it.
