Lumières Françaises

ABOUT THE FILM

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is a post-biopic about Caribbean surrealist Suzanne Césaire, deconstructing the process of bringing an actually-lived life to film. The film examines her relationship with her husband, French politician Aimé Césaire, and famed surrealist André Breton.

Filmed on the grounds of a tree archive in South Florida, a small group of filmmakers and actors consider the “paradise” of historic and political memory. The film takes place primarily in the space of the film set itself where actors and crew confront the history of this writer in her youth, and then stage scenes from her life. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is writer-director Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s first feature and stars César-award-winning actor Zita Hanrot and Motell Gyn Foster.

Inspired by the structures of Césaire’s own writing, which often took a colonial convention and unraveled it, the film deconstructs the narrative period biopic genre, moving between a conventional cinema and deconstructed experimental scenes. With a soundtrack by singer Sabine McCalla, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire plants us firmly in the darkness and desire of its subject matter while acknowledging the impossibility of resuscitating a legacy partially lost to time.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

Becoming a mother while reading Suzanne Césaire’s archive, I kept thinking how much the fragmented excerpts found there, filled with a penetrative social and poetic look at the world, must have been constantly interrupted by the demands on her as a mother of her six children, shared with her husband Aimé Césaire. The fragment becomes a central structure of our film and an idea about how cinema can tell stories. Rather than using cinema to smooth the edges of history, here cinema drops us off the cliff where the known runs out. This ballad is a post-modern romance, a biopic that acknowledges the reasons we think about history are always informed by the things we need most in the present.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is a filmmaker and artist who makes films concerned with the inner worlds of black women. Her work has been screened all over the world including at the 2023 Berlinale, the 2022 La Biennale di Venezia, the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of Art. Her films have been awarded special jury prize for best experimental film at Blackstar Film Festival and New Orleans Film Festival. She was named on Filmmaker Magazine's 2020 "25 New Faces of Independent Cinema List" and is the recipient of a 2023 Herb Alpert Award in Film, a 2022 Creative Capital Award, a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, and a 2014 Princess Grace Award in film.