Image via Facebook Oculus / Respawn
Facebook comes to the Academy Awards for the first time. “Colette,” coproduced by Facebook’s Ocular subsidiary, received an Oscar nomination for Best Short Documentary.
American director Anthony Giacchino (The Camden 28) focuses on two people, Colette Marin-Catherine, age 90, and Lucie Fouble, a young history student and docent at a French museum of the Resistance to the Nazis. Marin-Catherine’s older brother Jean-Pierre was a Resistance member arrested and deported to the German concentration camp at Nordhausen. While working on her dissertation, Fouble accompanies the elderly woman on the train ride to Nordhausen and a visit to the camp’s site. The old woman is overcome by anger and grief and the journey becomes an emotional experience for the student, not merely an academic exercise.
Marin-Catherine remains bitter over the fate of her brother, who died in March 1945, three weeks before U.S. troops liberated the camp. Nordhausen wasn’t a death camp on the scale of Auschwitz but it was a deadly place. Some 20,000 prisoners died there while performing slave labor. “Colette’s” most chilling scenes occur in the underground factory where Germany manufactured the first guided ballistic missile, the V2 rocket, fired at British cities. Stretching out through the cavern like an infernal mechanical snake is a rusted assembly line of death, a nightmare inferno that only a modern-day Dante could imagine.
Marin-Catherine and Fouble share many tearful moments, especially as they stand on the weed-covered field where once stood Block 7, the barracks where Jean-Pierre was kept. Photos show emaciated prisoners, agonized men sleeping on straw-covered ground. When the old woman asks Fouble why she made the journey, the young woman replies,” It’s so the past will be remembered.”
"Colette" can be viewed at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7uBf1gD6JY
It will also be released in theaters April 2 as part of the Oscar nominated short films release.
