Nicola Hens

Movies

Chichinette: The Accidental Spy
Director
When it seems that all the stories about World War II have already been told, a new one is often found. Marthe Cohn is a French Jew, whose life resembles a real-world blockbuster. During the war, she took the cover name Chichinette, became a spy, and gathered intel that helped organize an important military operation. Chichinette suffered many losses during the war, having been born in a Jewish family in a small industrial town close to the border between France and Germany. Now Marthe is 98 years old. Despite her age, she is savvy in modern technology and loves traveling the globe - she is often invited to go abroad and tell the story of her military achievements.
Death & the Maiden
Director of Photography
Shortly after World War II, over 1,000 paintings were found in a cellar in southern France. The paintings were created by a young Jewish woman named Charlotte Salomon. She painted her turbulent life story in a unique creation called: ‘Life? Or Theater? – A Tri-Colored Operetta.’ Death and the Maiden unravels the story behind her creation.
Europium
First Assistant Camera
Europium is structured like a nautilus shell, in which sequential narratives are nested within one another. Evolving around the eponymous rare earth element that will soon be mined from the ocean floor, Lisa Rave’s film draws intricate connections between ecology, currency, spiritism and commodity fetish as well as persisting colonial dependencies in the Pacific.