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Week of 11 September 1998 Vol. II, No. 5 Feature Article Five-time Oscar winner Arthur Cohn to introduce film at BU prescreening by Brian Fitzgerald Don't look for Central Station on an MBTA map. It's in Rio de Janeiro. Central Station is also the name of the latest movie produced by five-time Academy Award-winning producer Arthur Cohn. The highly acclaimed film will be prescreened on Thursday, September 17, at 6:30 p.m. in Metcalf Hall in the George Sherman Union. Everyone is welcome, and admission is free. However, because the last two prescreenings of Cohn's films completely filled the Tsai Performance Center and Metcalf Hall, respectively, those who wish to view Central Station at BU should arrive early. The general release of the film is scheduled for mid-November. Cohn, a 1988 BU honorary degree recipient, will introduce the film. He expressed his enthusiasm for Central Station in the May/ June issue of Preview magazine: "I don't have the feeling that we could have done it better. I sincerely believe that Central Station has a story in which it is extremely easy to identify with the protagonists, their problems, and their lives, and that it is very, very emotional. That's why I believe in it." The film tells the story of Dora, a former schoolteacher who supports herself by writing and mailing letters for illiterate passersby in the stifling halls of Brazil's busiest train station. When one of her clients is killed outside the station, Dora resolves to take in the woman's orphaned son, Josué. Resisting her initial impulse to make a quick profit off the child, Dora brings Josué to the remote northeast section of the country to return him to his father. Through the experiences of its central characters, the film examines a troubled country that is searching for its own roots. Arthur Cohn Central Station, in Portuguese with English subtitles, was directed by Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles. It debuted at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and was awarded the grand prize at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival -- where the audience was "moved to tears" during the screening, according to the newspaper Berliner Morgenpost. The Swiss-born Cohn is the only independent producer to have won five Academy Awards and the only foreign producer ever honored with a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. He has previously visited BU on four occasions: once to show his films The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Black and White in Color, a second time to introduce The Final Solution, his documentary on the Holocaust, a third time to receive an honorary doctor of fine arts degree in 1988, and most recently, in 1994 to introduce Two Bits, which starred Al Pacino. Cohn's first film, The Sky Above, the Mud Below, was named Best Documentary Feature at the 1961 Academy Awards. He went on to earn three best foreign-language film Oscars for The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), Black and White in Color (1977), and Dangerous Moves (1984). His 1990 film American Dream won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Cohn never joined the Hollywood system, perhaps because of his tendency to shoot films whose subjects are deemed of little interest to a mass audience. "You must understand that I'm not a major studio," he told Lifestyles magazine in a 1996 interview. "I have to create something which is