Today I would talk about the winner of the BEST DOCUMENTARY (short subject) section of this Oscars list. The name of this documentary is COLETTE. The director and the screenplay writer of the movie is Anthony Giacchino. It is produced by Alice Doyard, Aaron Matthews, and Annie Small. The language of the documentary is french and it's approximately 25 minutes long. It has been distributed by The Guardian and the releasing date was 16th Feb 2020.
The documentary starts with the view of Colette's room. In this scene she, her window, and a pigeon are present. Then the documentary starts to begin. Now, who is Colette? She is a 9O years old french lady who will take a step which she never wanted to do. In this documentary, we will see her journey of recollecting his brother's memories who was passed away around 74 years ago in a brutal concentration camp.
"Once I cross into Germany, I know one thing for sure, I won't ever be the same. "-Colette.
Colette starts her journey from Caen(France) to Nordhausen (Germany) with a student of history Lucie Fouble. Lucie works as a museum docent at La Coupole's second world war museum, Saint-Omer, France. While working on a biographical dictionary of 9000 french deportees, she discovers the name of Jean-Pierre Catherine, brother of Colette, who passed through the Nordhausen concentration camp and decides to write specifically about him. She goes on a tour of that concentration camp with Colette and they both experience that horrible past together. The biggest asset of this documentary is the experience, realization, and reaction of this old-young pair and their process of being each others' support in this tour.
"We were playing cat and mouse. And playing with fire. Or rather, the fire was playing with us"-Colette.
On the way to the destination, Lucie asks Colette about her memories of the resistance and her family situation back then. Colette starts to recall one of the toughest times of her life. In the year 1940, with the victory of Germany and the surrender of France, she and her family enter into the resistance. Colette was a little girl back then and was asked to sit and write down the registration number of the trucks passing by as her job there. She and her mother used to stay in the same network and her brother was in another. His group had been stockpiling weapons and seven were arrested. Only two came back. Unfortunately, 16 years old Jean-Pierre wasn't any of them.
"We were talking about his imprisonment and she said, " It should have been you. ". She would have preferred that I die instead of him. ", -Colette.
In the train journey, Lucie again brings up the topic and asked Colette about her brother. Colette can't tell much as they weren't that close to telling things about him. She explains her practical emotions towards him. She shares her grief about some of her mother's words that still hurt her after all these years.
After that, they reached Nordhausen. The former mayor of Nordhausen came to visit Colette and that night Colette gets fade up with this same discussion. But the next day she again prepares herself and went to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp with Lucie. This camp provided slave labor to the nazi war machine.60,000 prisoners passed through the camp and 20,000 died. Jean-Pierre arrived there on 11 February 1945. Here, to avoid allied bombing, laborers were moved to the underground. They worked 24 hours per day for the building V-2 (the world's first long-range ballistic missile) and tunnel work. Most of them died within a month. Jean-Pierre died on 22nd March 1945.
"If these hills could talk, I think we'd hear screams. "-Colette.
After visiting the crematorium, Colette and Lucie break down into tears. It was too heavy for them to watch the deadly existence of a past tragedy with their own eyes. Colette gives Lucie a ring of hers which was made by her brother for their mother when he was 12/13 years old. This scene means a lot to the whole documentary. The prisoners lived a nightmare there, been in hell for all those days by suffering from that life. It turns out that death was actually a redemption to them. This truth will last in your mind after watching this documentary. There's nothing to say more. Only I will suggest watching it at least once.
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