Susan Cohen is an independent film producer, screenwriter and film director.
Susan is a documentary filmmaker whose in-depth look at critical issues in our world has garnered top awards at many film festivals across the United States and around the world. In 2007, she was one of eight women selected from over 200 applicants to attend the American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women where she directed her first short film Open Your Eyes.
Open Your Eyes was the winner of the 2008 American Film Institute Jean Picker Firstenberg Award for Excellence, Best Short Film at the Anchorage International Film Festival 2008, Best Drama, Best Film, and Best Actress for Traci Dinwiddie at the Beverly Hills Shorts Festival 2009. Ms. Cohen won The Alexis Award for Most Promising Student Filmmaker at the Palm Springs International ShortFest 2008 and Best Director at both the Canada International Film Festival 2009 and Beverly Hills Shorts Festival 2009. Most recently Open Your Eyes was awarded The Jim DeMulling Speak Out Award and Honorable Mention for Best Narrative at the 42nd Humboldt Film Festival 2009 and is one of 19 films worldwide nominated for Best Short Film at the Milan International Film Festival 2009.
Open Your Eyes was Susan's first foray as a writer and director. She is also the producer of the award-winning short films Fueling the Fire and "Animated American", the Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival finalist Fortune Teller, and the DWW short film Laying Down Arms.
Famous quotes containing the words susan and/or cohen:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“What is most original in a man’s nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn’t have been content to enjoy the atmosphere.”
—Leonard Cohen (b. 1934)