Colette Marin-Catherine fought back against the Nazis as a girl in France.
Her brother, Jean-Pierre, died at the German Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp after being arrested as a member of the French Resistance when he was 17.
And for 74 years, she swore she’d never go to Germany.
In the Oscar-nominated short film “Colette” (watch above), director Anthony Giacchino documented how she broke that promise after meeting Lucie Fouble, a young history student and docent at a World War II museum near Saint-Omer, France.
“Once I cross into Germany, I won’t ever be the same,” Marin-Catherine says in the film.
The 90-year-old member of the French Resistance visits Mittelbau-Dora, also known as Nordhausen, in Giacchino’s 25-minute subtitled film, distributed by The Guardian.
For 74 years, Colette Marin-Catherine avoided visiting the concentration camp where her brother died. She spent that time trying to "forget."Still from "Colette"
Giacchino, who is based in New York, grew up in Edgewater Park, Burlington County, and is nominated for an Oscar for best documentary short at the 93rd Academy Awards Sunday (the Oscars air 8 p.m. ET April 25 on ABC). The former Fulbright scholar, an alum of Holy Cross Preparatory Academy in Delran, filmed the documentary in France and Germany.
The short film is an uncensored look at grief, memory and the atrocities of the Nazis. Marin-Catherine recalls what her mother once said to her about her brother’s death: “It should have been you.”
“I spent 74 years trying to forget she would have preferred that I die instead of him,” she says in the film.
“Colette,” though distributed by The Guardian, also has a connection to a video game. The documentary was included in the gallery mode of the first-person shooter virtual reality game “Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond” from Respawn Entertainment and Oculus Studios, co-producers of the film. This makes “Colette” the first Oscar nomination for a video game company.
Colette Marin-Catherine's brother Jean-Pierre, a member of the French Resistance, died in a German concentration camp in 1945, three weeks before Americans liberated the camp.Still from "Colette"
Fouble, 17, connects with Marin-Catherine because she is working on a biographical dictionary for La Coupole Museum about 9,000 French deportees, including Jean-Pierre.
Giacchino told The Guardian that he was in France with producer Alice Doyard pursuing a different story, about an American veteran who crash landed there during the invasion of Normandy, when a tour guide mentioned Marin-Catherine and how she was in the French Resistance.
The filmmakers knew that they wanted to document Marin-Catherine’s interaction with the past at the concentration camp, but also knew that she was insistent on not going to Germany. Like she says in the film, she spent so long trying to “forget.”
“We felt we couldn’t suggest it without a purpose beyond simply visiting the spot where her brother died,” Giacchino told The Guardian.
Doyard found out about Fouble’s project and saw it as a way to convince Marin-Catherine to visit the site — the notion that other people, like the young student, would want to remember her brother and what happened to him.
“Studying this morbid, violent period of history can help us prevent it from happening again,” Fouble says in the film.
Colette Marin-Catherine changes her mind about staying out of Germany when she encounters the work of young history student and museum docent Lucie Fouble.Still from "Colette"
In the end, it was Fouble’s work that convinced Marin-Catherine to make the trip to Germany, where Jean-Pierre was one of many prisoners who were forced to make bombs for the Nazis in an underground tunnel. He died in 1945, just three weeks before American forces liberated the concentration camp.
Fouble and Marin-Catherine travel together to the German concentration camp despite Marin-Catherine’s reservations about what she calls “morbid tourism.”
“When it’s your turn to live through a war, you’ll see, you don’t have time to feel anything,” she says.
They push through tears to visit the site at Nordhausen where Jean-Pierre slept on the floor, the tunnel where he worked all day and the building where his body was cremated.
Giacchino’s previous work includes the 2007 PBS documentary “The Camden 28,” about religious opposition to the Vietnam War and a group of Catholics who were arrested for attempting to break into a draft board in Camden in 1971. The film received a Writers Guild Award nomination for best documentary screenplay. Giacchino’s 2016 film “The Giant’s Dream” examines the making of the film “The Iron Giant.”
In 2008, Giacchino won an Emmy for producing the short-format nonfiction program “Great Moments from the Campaign Trail” for the History Channel.
His brother, Michael Giacchino, is an Oscar-winning composer (”Jojo Rabbit,” “Ratatouille,” “War for the Planet of the Apes”) who won an Academy Award in 2010 for his score for the movie “Up.” He also scored previous “Medal of Honor” video games and the upcoming film “The Batman,” directed by Matt Reeves and starring Robert Pattinson. The composer is working on the upcoming Jurassic Park movie “Jurassic World: Dominion.”
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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.
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