The story seems invented as befits a Hollywood production.
And yet.
Colette
, a film dedicated to Colette Marin-Catherine, a 90-year-old former Norman resistance fighter in the footsteps of her brother who died in a concentration camp, was nominated for the Oscars on Monday March 15 in the short documentary category .
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The adventure begins in 2019. Accompanied by Lucie Fouble, a seventeen-year-old volunteer at the Coupole d'Helfaut - a memorial center dedicated to the Second World War - Colette tried to reconstruct the career of Jean-Pierre Catherine, a deported resistance fighter. towards the Dora camp, where the Germans imprisoned men to manufacture the V2 missiles.
The young man died there.
“
When Jean-Pierre Catherine was deported, he was seventeen.
He died ten days after turning nineteen in Dora.
I'll have twenty soon.
Jean-Pierre has not lived until then,
”Lucie Fouble reports to
La Voix du Nord
.
Read also: Watch the documentary for free on the
Guardian
website
Colette, "a fantastic personality"
American director and French documentary producer Anthony Giacchino and Alice Doyard discovered their story as they shot a series of portraits of WWII actors in Normandy in 2018.
Chance encounter: they come across Colette Marin-Catherine, "
a fantastic personality
," says Alice Doyard.
Then emerges the idea of following the nonagenarian in her quest.
New blessed chance: Laurent Thiery, historian, who from La Coupole coordinates the writing of the
Book of the 9000 deportees from France to Mittelbau-Dora
, published in 2020, puts a name and a face on those who have passed through the concentration camp.
A notice concerns Jean-Pierre and the young Lucie is the author.
Read also: 1945:
Le Figaro
discovers the Nazi concentration camps
The film highlights this obsession for the truth, carried by the pain of a woman who
"
took
seventy-five years to forget"
the death of her brother and the concern of an apprentice historian to "
transmit her story, to do not forget the past
”.
Colette
navigates between historical documentary and emotional film, discreetly highlighting the work of La Coupole, where we follow Lucie Fouble, especially at the beginning of the documentary.
An enhancement underlined by the director of the institution, Philippe Queste: “
The film highlights the
Book of 9,000
, the work of a volunteer, brilliant, the youngest.
"
"Huge honor"
Despite the location, the story and the film crew,
Colette
has never been shown in France but it can be viewed on the
Guardian
website
which hosts it.
The documentary was selected for the first time at the beginning of February, like ten others among the one hundred and fourteen productions in the running, to appear on the list of films potentially nominated for the Oscars.
Several times crowned in the United States,
Colette
finally obtained her nomination.
A
"huge honor"
for all those who participated, directly or indirectly, in the making of the short film.
It remains to be seen whether the 93rd ceremony, rescheduled for April 25 due to the pandemic, will definitely honor him.
