CHAIN premiered at the 2004 Berlinale, Forum Section, and was selected for several international film festivals including Edinburgh, Vancouver, Vienna, Woodstock, Cinematexas, and Singapore.

CHAIN won the Turning Leaf/Someone to Watch Award at the 2005 IFP Independent Spirit Awards. It was also selected as one of the “10 most promising films of the year” from North and South America and presented in a special Variety Critics’ Choice sidebar at the Montreal Film Festival.

It won the Prix Léo Scheer Award at the Belfort Entrevues Film Festival and had its New York premiere at the Museum of Modern Art (Premieres Series).

CRITICAL PRAISE FOR CHAIN:

"Ambitious...CHAIN links narrative fiction filmmaking to avant-garde with vision and authority…The cumulative effect is profoundly unsettling, but is tempered by Cohen's effortlessly eye-catching compositions… Strong word-of-mouth on the fest circuit will link pic to limited specialized theatrical, quality worldwide tube sales and niche home vid life.”

-Eddie Cockrell, Variety

“Cohen is concerned with the things that hold us together and keep us apart in the modern world.  CHAIN is impressive not only for the way it integrates documentary into fiction but also for the more difficult task of using fiction to articulate things seen by a documentarian’s eye.”

-Alice Lovejoy, Film Comment

“Heartbreaking and trance-inducing at once. The characters are very affecting and could not be more real.”

-Luc Sante

“Revealing a little-seen side of the States, CHAIN is a stunningly original montage movie, in which Cohen contrasts the fates of an ambitious Japanese businesswoman awaiting orders from head office and a world-weary video diarist, who drifts between various dead-end jobs, squats and motels. Visually and politically astute, this thoroughly deserves a theatrical release.”

-David Parkinson, BBC

“An uncategorisable hybrid of social critique, poetic essay and haunted travelogue… This is vital, boundary-pushing film making.”

-Sukhdev Sandhu,  London Daily Telegraph

"****1/2... A glimpse of the future, here and now. Call it Present Shock. What’s scary and depressing is that 20 or 30 years ago,  CHAIN would have looked like a dystopian sci-fi nightmare. Today it looks so much like a documentary that some audiences assume it is one."

-Tom Charity, Vancouver Sun