Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
During the Nazi occupation of France, 14-year-old Colette Marin-Catherine joined the French resistance alongside her family. ‘We were playing cat and mouse. And playing with fire. Or rather, fire was playing with us,’ Marin-Catherine, now 92, recalls. Sadly, not everyone in her family would live to see France liberated. Her brother Jean-Pierre was just 17 when he was arrested for stockpiling weapons. He would die in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in March 1945, just three weeks before the camp was liberated.
In this short documentary, Marin-Catherine faces her trauma with the support of a history student named Lucie Fouble – only 17 years old herself. For the first time in her life, and with Fouble ever by her side, Marin-Catherine travels from France to Germany to visit the camp where some 20,000 Nazi prisoners including her brother died. The US director Anthony Giacchino and the French producer Alice Doyard won the 2021 Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) for this poignant portrait of bravery and healing amid the long, painful echoes of the Second World War. An accomplished and moving piece of filmmaking, Colette is a reminder of the tremendous power of individual stories to humanise history.
video
Family life
The precious family keepsakes that hold meaning for generations
10 minutes
video
Neuroscience
This intricate map of a fruit fly brain could signal a revolution in neuroscience
2 minutes
video
Archaeology
What did the first people who entered Tutankhamun’s tomb see?
5 minutes
video
Information and communication
Coverage of the ‘balloon boy’ hoax forms a withering indictment of for-profit news
17 minutes
video
Childhood and adolescence
Marmar is living through a devastating war – but she’d rather tell you about her new dress
8 minutes
video
Meaning and the good life
Wander through the English countryside with two teens trying to make sense of the world
10 minutes
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
The ‘cloud’ requires heaps of energy to stay aloft. Could synthetic DNA be the answer?
12 minutes
video
Art
A puppeteer makes sense of an overwhelming world by shrinking it down to size
5 minutes
video
History
There are fragments of Romani Gypsy history all over the UK – if one knows where to look
3 minutes