Two documentaries up for Oscars tell stories of nonagenarians IN THE
The Oscar isn’t the only one celebrating its 93rd trip around the sun at the Academy Awards ceremony this year. The shorts category features two documentaries, “A Concerto is a Conversation “and “Colette,” about fellow nonagenarians who have led extraordinary and extraordinarily different lives.
One, Horace Bowers, is a 93-year-old Black man born in the Jim Crow South who became a successful business owner in California and the grandfather of a prominent composer. The other, Colette Marin-Catherine, is a French woman who was part of the resistance during World War II. She turns 93 on April 25, the day of the ceremony. Neither ever dreamed that they would have any connection to the movies at all, let alone Hollywood’s greatest honor.
“I do think it’s an amazing coincidence and sort of feels fateful that both Horace and Colette are not only very close to the same age but that the Oscars itself was born at almost the exact same time as they came into the world and that almost a century would pass before their stars aligned,” said Ben Proudfoot, the co-director of “A Concerto is a Conversation.” “It’s like a Halley’s Comet that all these threads would come together at this exact moment.
I think it’s pretty special.”
At the same time Bowers was dreaming of escaping the South, Marin-Catherine was an ocean away in the Normandy region and war was breaking out around her. She was just 10 years old when the Germans invaded France. Soon after, she and her family joined the French Resistance. Being so young, all she was asked to do at the beginning was to write down the registration numbers of passing trucks. Later, she and her mother assisted at the hospital. In 1943, her older brother JeanPierre was arrested as a political prisoner and taken to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp near Nordhausen, Germany, where he would die three weeks before it was liberated.
Bowers, who has had a difficult year undergoing cancer treatments, is especially looking forward to the ceremony. MarinCatherine, meanwhile, will be watching from home.