This five-time Oscar-winning distinguished Swiss-born international producer has played an important role in distributing a wide range of foreign and documentary films in the USA. Cohn's first notable success was the Oscar-winning documentary "Le ciel et la boue/The Sky Above, the Mud Below" (1961). Later, he teamed with Vittorio de Sica, handling most of the master director's final films, including the Oscar-winning study of two Jewish families who cannot escape their destiny in the second World War, the highly-acclaimed "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" (1971).
Cohn continued his string of Best Foreign Film Oscars with "Black and White in Color" (1976), a satirical anti-war story set in Africa's Ivory Coast, and "La Diagonale du Fou/Dangerous Moves" (1984), a drama, shot in Switzerland and set in the high-tension world of international championship chess. He also made notable returns to the realm of documentary with "The Final Solution" (1983), termed by Elie Wiesel as the most impressive film-document about the Holocaust. and with Barbara Kopple's landmark saga of a six-year labor dispute at a Minnesota meat-packing plant, "American Dream" (1990).
More recently, he produced the family drama "Two Bits" (1995), starring Al Pacino, and the Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear winner "Central Station/Central do Brasil" (1998).