Paulus Henrique Benedictus Cox (16 April 194018 June 2016), known as Paul Cox, was a Dutch-Australian filmmaker who has been recognized as "Australia's most prolific film auteur". Background Cox was born to Else (née Kuminack), a German, and father Wim Cox, on 16 April 1940, in Venlo, Limburg, the Netherlands, after his brother (also named Wim) and sister Elizabeth, and was the eldest of sisters Jacoba, Angeline and Christa. Father, Wim Cox A documentary film producer and son of the publisher of the Catholic newspaper Nieuwe Venlosche Courant, Cox senior in 1933 launched the lavishly illustrated, but ultimately unsuccessful, film magazine Zuiderfilm, and in 1935 proposed to build a cinema at the newspaper's office. He was commissioned in 1938 by Van Meegeren, the chairman of the 'RK Bond voor Groote Families' (Catholic Association for Large Families) founded in 1917 by Mathijs Janssen, to make the film Levensgang ('The Journey of Life'.) Wim Cox had made shorts before, but this was his first major film. Using 16 mm film and a self-designed sound system, he recorded the daily life of a large Catholic family in Venlo. Film critic Janus van Domburg (1895–1983) praised Levensgang as the Netherlands best 16mm film to date. The Tegelse Courant wrote: '...this film projects a beam of light on the path of life'. The non-Catholic Algemeen Handelsblad agreed: "[Cox] has managed to capture scenes of joy and sadness, moments of emotion and contemplation on film. All is edited into a fascinating and flowing whole, with strong cinematic rhythms that speak a clear language." Between its premiere on October 12, 1938, until 1940 the film was seen by 25,000. Paul Cox discovered only much later that his father had been a filmmaker who made documentaries in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany before the Second World War. Paul Cox is recorded as saying that though his father's film was 'dreadful propoaganda' and terribly outdated,' he admired it as "real cinema. The whole concept of it was very meticulously researched, you can see that in the storyboarding of every shot. It's quite a remarkable piece of work. This is, in a way, a better propaganda film than anything Leni Riefenstahl ever did.' Brother, Wim Cox Cox's older brother Wim, born 1938, after learning from assisting his father also made a career in film and photography. He studied at the Nederlansche Fotofakschool 1958-61, moved to Cologne to work in the