A documentary veteran at 30
Erika Cohn
Age: 30 Lives in: Berkeley What she does: Cohn is a documentary filmmaker whose work to date has led her from the gridiron in her native Salt Lake City to the Shariah court in the Palestinian territories.
Career highlights: Cohn’s first feature, “In Football We Trust,” which she co-directed and produced, won the 2017 outstanding business and economic documentary Emmy. Her solo feature directorial debut, “The Judge,” premiered in September at the Toronto International Film Festival and was nominated for an outstanding business and economic documentary Emmy.
On the brink: It’s been evident that Cohn seems destined for a major motion picture career since at least 2009, when she captured a DGA Student Film Award as best woman student filmmaker for her narrative short, “When Voices Fade.” Now, between the Emmy win and the premiere of “The Judge,” a documentary about Kholoud Al-Faqih, the first woman appointed to a Shariah court in the Middle East, Cohn’s career is blossoming.
Cohn was an associate producer on the PBS series “God in America,” but her big break came when her mentor, Geralyn White Dreyfous, an executive producer on “In Football We Trust,” invited her to join Tony Vainuku’s documentary about Pacific Islander athletes with NFL dreams.
“I learned a lot about the nitty-gritty details of filmmaking, about the process of raising funding, about the process of applying for grants and receiving rejections over and over and over and over again,” Cohn says of the project in a conversation over coffee in Toronto. “I think personally, the more I hear no, the more I strive to get a yes.”
How Cohn came to “The Judge” was serendipitous. It was 2012, and she was on a hiatus from “In Football We Trust.” She was teaching film and studying in Jerusalem when she went to an Islamic reform meeting in Ramallah and met Al-Faqih.
“‘Oh, so you’re a filmmaker, great! Because I’ve been wanting a film to be made,’ ” Cohn remembers Al-Faqih telling her.
Cohn is working on “In the Belly of the Beast,” with SFFilm as fiscal sponsor, about women fighting reproductive injustice, a documentary that she hopes to debut in late 2018 or early 2019. Immediately after that, she expects to step away from nonfiction film for a time to concentrate on making her narrative feature debut.
“I love what I do,” she says. “I think it’s a tremendous privilege to be able to tell the stories that I’ve told, and I want to continue doing that.”
Lawbreaker:
Within “The Judge” are striking aerial images that emphasize the West Bank’s stunning views. As an example of how dedicated Cohn is to achieving her vision, she admits to breaking laws to achieve those shots. “You’re not supposed to fly a drone in the West Bank,” she says, “but we snuck up a drone in very specific areas and were able to kind of navigate it, taking a big risk, but getting an unprecedented look at that beauty.”