Texas Focus: Sacrifice

Rating: NR
Suggested age: 13+
Starring: Dermot Mulroney, Melora Walters, Luke Kleintank, James McDaniel, Brandon Mychal Smith, Austin Abrams
Director/Writer: Michael Cohn
Runtime: 105 min.
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Release year: 2015

Hank is a handsome, multi-talented high school student who has just led his football team to a stunning victory during the biggest game of the season. Eager scouts are circling and Hank’s parents are counting on their son to win a scholarship to a good college so he can enjoy a brighter future, far away from their hardscrabble life in Texas. Their younger son, Tim, idolizes his older brother and persuades Hank and his friends to let him tag along on their celebratory hunting trip. It is a decision they soon regret.

Hank finds himself at the center of a desperate and rapidly deteriorating situation that tests his moral compass and threatens to destroy his family and his dream.

Writer/Director Michael Cohn is a filmmaker with twenty-five years experience in the entertainment industry. Previous to Sacrifice, he directed three feature films, Interceptor with Jurgen Prochnow and Andrew Divoff, When the Bough Breaks with Martin Sheen and Ron Perlman, and Snow White with Sigourney Weaver and Sam Neill. As a screenwriter Mr. Cohn has worked with such directors as Tim Burton, John McTiernan, Bille August, Alfonso Arau, and Martin Scorsese.

With a Masters Degree from the University of Texas at Austin filmmaking program, Mr. Cohn has divided his time over the years between filmmaking endeavors and teaching film production classes at various programs including UT, Austin, Chapman University, and the local community college in Houston, where he and his family currently reside.

Cohn completed his screenplay and was looking for a producer when a friend encouraged him visit the JuntoBox Films website. He learned that JuntoBox Films is a collaborative film studio and social community for filmmakers and fans to connect, create and, ultimately, make films. Founded in 2012 by Academy Award-winning actor Forest Whitaker and writer/director Phillipe Caland, JuntoBox Films merges the collaborative energy of a social media platform with the more traditional in-house film development process, including greenlighting, financing, marketing and distribution. JuntoBox Films creators, filmmakers, and film fans present ideas to the community, which are vetted through a patented methodology identifying the best talent and scripts. After a project moves up through the system, JuntoBox Films ultimately chooses and produces a selection of the most successful ones. Cohn was immediately impressed by the simple brilliance of the concept and mounted his own project page right away. “Through dumb luck I posted my project page just as JuntoBox was preparing to quickly greenlight several projects,” he recounts. “To my amazement and delight, my project was plucked for consideration within several weeks after I posted it.” By April 2013, Sacrifice was in production.

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