Colette
2020 · 25m · USA/France
Directed by Anthony Giacchino
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Ninety-year-old French Resistance fighter Colette Marin-Catherine, accompanied by a young aspiring historian, travels for the first time to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in Germany where her brother was killed in 1945. The intergenerational pilgrimage becomes an act of belated reckoning with grief she has refused to face for seventy-four years.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A video-game studio funding a Holocaust documentary sounds like a corporate stunt, but Giacchino somehow threads that needle without flinching—the weirdness of the premise becomes invisible because the film earns it.
This is a masterclass in restraint: the intergenerational framing, the return to Mittelbau-Dora after seventy-four years, the formal decision to let Colette's silence speak as loudly as her testimony—every choice sits in dialogue with how documentary and memory itself have been constructed.
The film lives or dies on Colette's face in the final moments at the camp, and Giacchino knows it—he gives her space to exist in that feeling without instructing us how to interpret it, which is the hardest and most necessary choice a director can make here.
Reviews
Giacchino makes all the right choices. He gives the women room physical and emotional space, pulling the camera back rather than crowding in.
An account of an elderly Frenchwoman's pilgrimage to the Nazi concentration camp site in Germany where her brother perished in 1945 — and the bond that blossoms between Colette and an aspiring teenage historian.
Festivals
- Academy Awards 2021, Best Documentary Short Subject (Winner)