33rd Israel Film Festival in Los Angeles, November 12th — 26th: Sold-Out Opening Night Gala
Six-time Academy Award winning producer Arthur Cohn and producer Sharon Harel-Cohen receive festival honors.
Incitement has its U.S. premiere
It looked like every Jew in entertainment attended the Opening Night Gala. It was the first time Opening Night was completely sold out a week in advance to a capacity crowd of over 900 guests at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills.
The packed audience greeted the evening’s host, Israel FilmFestival Founder/Executive Director Meir Fenigstein, with a standing ovation in recognition of his outstanding leadership of the Festival for over three decades.
Standing ovations continued as six-time Academy Award-winning producer Arthur Cohn received the 2019 IFF Lifetime Achievement Award from actress Rosanna Arquette and when WestEnd Film Chair and producer Sharon Harel-Cohen was presented with the 2019 IFF Achievement in Film Award by Avi Lerner, Chairman/CEO, Millennium Media.
The honored Arthur Cohn is 92 years old. An independent film producer, he has won six Academy Awards, more than any other independent producer in film history.
He is so illustrious that I am quoting what he said plus the IMDb Mini Biography By: CineTruthIMDb here:
Cohn was born in Basel, Switzerland February 4, 1927. His grandfather was at the conference in which Theodor Herzl founded Zionism. His father, Dr. Marcus Cohn, a lawyer and leader of the Swiss Zionist movement, saved many Jews in WWII from within Switzerland. He 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 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, about which he wrote three books. He shifted from journalistic writing to scriptwriting, but soon found his passion was in supervising other scripts and producing movies.
His first film production, Le ciel et la boue/ 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; Lo chiameremo 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.
His account on The Shoah 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 90s 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 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 Jose 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.
Also at the Israel Film Festival were 25 of today’s leading Israeli filmmakers and talent who have films playing in the Festival. The Festival bowed with the U.S. Premiere of renowned director Yaron Zilberman’s Incitement, the winner of the Ophir Award for Israel’s Best Feature Film in 2019 and Israel’s Official Selection to the 2019 Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film.
Yaron Zilberman spoke and acknowledged that the past 15 years were the greatest in Israeli film history. Even if this film was not funded by the Israel Film Fund which operates independently of the government, the greatness is attributable to the recently retired head of the Israel Film Fund, Katriet Schory who has fought his own government for creative freedom for its filmmakers and greenlit some of the strongest most compelling films of any country.
A psychological thriller, Incitement chronicles the year leading to the assassination of Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. On the backdrop of Rabin’s efforts to end once and for all the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the film is told through the journey of the assassin.
The other 25 filmmakers and actors with films in the Festival included…
- Alon Aboutboul King Bibi Narrator, Forgiveness Actor
- Guy Amir Forgiveness Director, Actor
- Ari Davidovich Shai K. Director
- David Deri You Only Die Twice & Labor, Rebellion, Upheaval Writer, Director
- Anat Goren Dayan — The First Family Creator
- Alon Gur Arye Mossad! Director
- Jorge Gurvich Back to Maracana Director
- Ramy A. Katz Cause of Death Director
- Reshef Levi Nehama Creator Actor
- Ram Loevy The Dead of Jaffa Director
- Dani Menkin Picture of His Life Director
- Yariv Mozer Reichman Director
- Amos Nachoum Picture of His Life Actor
- Eran Naim Love Trilogy: Chained Actor
- Ofer Naim Mossad!, Love in Suspenders Producer
- Yehuda Nahari Halevi Incitement Actor
- Naama Preis The God of the Piano Actress
- Hanan Savyon Forgiveness Director Actor
- Schaul Scherzer Reichman Producer
- Tamar Sela Incitement Producer
- Adar Shafran Douze Points Forgiveness Producer
- David Silber Incitement Producer
- Jorge Weller Love in Suspenders Director
- Yaron Zilberman Incitement Director
- David Zucker Mossad Special Guest and Advisor
“The Israel Film Festival opening night was a triumphant and successful start to what will be two weeks of premiere screenings of the very best of critically acclaimed and crowd-pleasing Israeli cinema,” said Fenigstein. “Nowhere else will audiences be able to see 35 award-winning Israeli movies, documentaries and tv shows complete with Q&As with their visiting filmmakers and talent in attendance.”
For further information on all films, schedules and to purchase tickets visit www.IsraelFilmFestival.com Festival screenings take place at the Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills and the Laemmle Town Center 5 Theatre in Encino. For further information contact the IsraFest Foundation: 310.247.1800 or email info@israelfilmfestival.org.
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