Facebook and Respawn Entertainment win first Oscar with documentary Colette

Facebook’s Oculus Studios and EA’s Respawn Entertainment have won an Oscar together for the short documentary Colette. It is the first Oscar won for a game industry project.

The 25-minute documentary Colette is about former French resistance fighter Colette Marin-Catherine as she travels to Germany for the first time in 74 years. The documentary was developed for the VR game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond from Oculus Studios and Respawn, but can also be seen as a standalone documentary via The Guardian.

Colette is assisted in the documentary by history student Lucie Fouble, who convinces the resistance fighter to visit the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp where the Nazis murdered her brother. In the documentary, Marin-Catherine shares her story with photos from the past.

Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond features several short documentaries such as Colette, which are interspersed with gameplay in which the player takes on the role of an allied secret agent with the aim of infiltrating the Nazi war machine.

The short documentary was directed by Anthony Giacchino, Respawn’s Peter Hirschmann was the executive producer, who was involved with EA as VP of Product Development in the development of several Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, including The Force Unleashed and the LEGO games, and as producer of the original 1999 Medal of Honor game.