‘Colette’ wins Oscar for best documentary short. Watch the film from N.J. director.
Updated 9:39 PM;
The film’s director, Anthony Giacchino, grew up in Edgewater Park, Burlington County.
He found 90-year-old Colette Marin-Catherine when he was in France scouting out another project.
Giacchino, accepting the award, noted that her (93rd) birthday falls on the Oscars.
Marin-Catherine’s brother, Jean-Pierre, died at the German Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp after he was arrested as a member of the French Resistance when he was 17.
The Nazis forced Jean-Pierre into slave labor, ordering him to spend entire days in an underground tunnel making bombs for the Germans. He died in 1945, three weeks before Americans liberated the camp.
Watch ‘Colette,’ the moving Oscar-nominated short film from N.J. director
Today 11:48 AM
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.