She rose to prominence when Anthony Giacchino's short documentary Colette, which follows her on a visit to Dora's camp where her brother died, won the Oscar in its category at the 93rd Academy Awards.
[3] Still a high school student,[4] and 16-year old[5] Colette Marin-Catherine joined the French Resistance around Caen[6] as a reconnaissance agent.
"[2] Her brother Jean-Pierre Catherine, born in 1926 and a student at the school for aspirants of the Merchant Navy in Caen, joined the Resistance in 1940 - he was 13 years old - with a group of comrades from Bretteville-l'Orgueilleuse and Putot-en-Bessin.
Another brother, named Gaston, thirteen years older than Colette Marin-Catherine, dies on his return from deportation.
On September 28, 1944, Colette Marin-Catherine and her mother left the Bayeux military hospital and returned home for the first time since D-Day.
In order to support herself and her sick 60-year-old mother, Colette Marin-Catherine worked as a nurse and seamstress in the village, selling vegetables, chickens and rabbits.
Seventy years after the event, she described the voters “intimidated” by the “village aristocracy”: “It was a party, and at the same time, it was impressive.
[3] In 2018, the American director Anthony Giacchino and the French producer Alice Doyard were in Normandy to make portraits of resistance fighters.
[11] Discovering "her aura in front of the camera, but also her desire to transmit the memory of her brother", according to the words of Alice Doyard,[4] they had the idea of making a film.
At the same time, they met the historian Laurent Thierry, present at La Coupole memorial center in Pas-de-Calais and coordinator of the biographical dictionary Livre des 9 000 déportés de France à Mittelbau-Dora and the student Lucie Fouble, responsible for writing the biographical notice of Jean-Pierre Catherine.
[12][13] The team of the film offered Colette Marin-Catherine a commemorative paving stone in memory of her brother, called Stolperstein, made by the German artist Gunter Demnig.