Colette
The french resistance fighter confronting facism
Colette has been nominated for an Academy Award (2021) in the category of best documentary short.
90-year-old Colette Marin-Catherine is a former French resistance fighter. On the anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg trials, she decided to heal her trauma by confronting her past. After resisting going back to Germany, she finally took a trip to visit the concentration camp where her brother was murdered. While planning the trip she was aware that as soon as she crossed the border into Germany, she would never be the same.
Colette spent a week talking to Lucie Fouble, a history student from the Museum Docent. Lucie took it upon herself to try to preserve the historical facts of the events that took place at the concentration camps. At the time she met with Colette she was working on a biographical dictionary listing the almost 9,000 French deportees who passed through the Nordhausen concentration camp.
Because Lucie Fouble would be writing specifically about Jean-Pierre Catherine, Colette’s brother, she was grateful to not need to rely exclusively on the information in the archives, but have the opportunity to instead interview Colette.
The reason why Colette never visited the camp before was because the photos she had seen were horrific and she was not interested in morbid tourism. But after evaluating Lucie Fouble’s work, she agreed to go.
It has been said that those who forget their history are bound to repeat the mistakes of their forefathers. By documenting everything, Lucie hopes that the horror of what happened in concentration camps is never repeated. Watch this film now.
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