Mission

He graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., in 1965.  

He entered the Master’s Film program at UCLA in 1965 but dropped out the next year during the “Summer of Love” and moved to San Francisco. 

There, he began a lifelong study of meditation, yoga, mystic arts, Sufism, and the esoteric traditions of the world’s religions, while working in the top documentary film unit in the USA at KQED, Public Television. 

His film A.C.T. Now (1968) received a Cine Golden Eagle award for direction. 

He received a Master of Fine Arts from UCLA Film School in 1973 for his direction of Sunseed (1973). 

SunSeed (1973) is an examination of the new spirituality that captivated the young in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, featuring such great spiritual and generational leaders as Ram Dass, Roshi Suzuki, Swami Satchidananda, Pir Vilayat Khan, Sufi Samuel Lewis, Roshi Suzuki, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Lama Govinda, and many more.

• A sympathetic introduction to the new age…sensitive and skillfully made…stunning camera work”–New York Times, November 3, 1973
• “The first film classic of the new age”–East West Journal, October 1973
• Extraordinarily powerful’–Kevin Thomas, L.A. Times
• Full of love and laughter”–Boston Globe, January 29, 1974
• Impressive”–Goleta Valley Today, February 19, 1973
• “Sunseed’ will fascinate”–Omaha World Herald, February 8, 1974
• Witness a New Age of Love and Joy”–Tucson Daily Citizen, July 31, 1974

Its first showing was at the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco in 1974 and later had its New York premiere at the Whitney Museum in New York City in the New American Filmmakers series, where it became the most viewed film in the history of the series. 

His film Elliott Porter’s World (1988) brought him his second Cine Golden Eagle award. 

In 2019, his SunSeed: The Journey received worldwide acclaim as an Official Selection at numerous Film Festivals. In SunSeed :The Journey, Mr. Cohn revisited the first film for students of the original SunSeed generation of spiritual teachers by adding new material that brought it full circle, including the very last interview with his dear friend Ram Dass before he passed, interviews and narration by the great actor and cultural icon Peter Coyote, and Cohn’s own personal reflections about his lifelong pilgrimage making the two movies. 

In keeping with today’s new distribution systems and audience tastes he established www.SunSeed.org (2020) with an online store offering purchase and rental of streaming copies of SunSeed-The Journey. The website is a self-sustaining online community which now has over 30,000 subscribers and has reached millions online.

Our SunSeed WisdomTalks Webinar / Podcast series is distributed free on the website and YouTube. It has presented eminent guests including Pir Shabda Kahn,  Ramdas Lamb, Shahabuddin David Less, Robert Thurman, Jonathan Granoff, Audrey Kitagawa,  Peter Coyote, Joseph Goldstein, and Father Francis Clooney, to mention just a few. Many of these programs have received hundreds of thousands of views.

He began shooting SunFlower in 2024. SunFlower’s goal is to introduce timeless life-changing spiritual wisdom worldwide from today’s spiritual leaders to new generations of seekers. We seek to amplify understanding of timeless principles of inner and outer peace, helping people of goodwill realize their divine power to change themselves and the world for the better. 

With SunFlower, we are applying the wisdom of the past and working with today’s greatest thought leaders, nurturing and empowering an interfaith community of visionary spiritual and philosophical warriors by means of entertaining, enlightening, educational, and culture-impacting media.

Due to the importance of the message and the scale of distribution in this digital age, SunFlower will be distributed first as a theatrical motion picture all over the world and then streamed. 

In the same style as SunSeed and SunSeed-The Journey, SunFlower will demonstrate the worldwide scope of today’s new spirituality by going wherever the action is, making it a visually stunning, colorful documentary of compelling interest internationally. 

We have already taken SunFlower’s cameras to Israel to interview the leaders of the Abraham Peace movement (Jewish, Islamic, Christian, and Druze) and to South America to  leaders of the Eco Community movement and the Ruhaniat Sufi movement founded by Hazrat Inayat Khan and later “Sufi Sam” Lewis, now led by Pir Shabda Kahn.