The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire

TIFF65: Greek Premiere
“We are making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered”: French actress Zita Hanrot, breaks the fourth wall, staring the audience in the eye, and describes the impossible endeavor she is about to undertake. She has to portray Suzanne Césaire; a feminist from Martinique, a poet possessing a distinctive Afro-surreal idiom, a strong anti-colonialist voice taking a stand despite her limited work, an activist that marked the Négritude spiritual movement of the 1930s in Paris, a woman who was dubbed by His/tory as the wife of the famous politician, Aimé Césaire. Following her César Award, Hanrot, an up-and-coming star in French cinema, has just given birth to a baby, which she puts to sleep in between shoots, in between the cracks of “reality” that emerge, when it clashes with intergenerational desires, dreams and the trauma of races and genders, with stories that grow roots. As this unparalleled story unfolds, playfully adopting the meta-cinema format only to gradually surrender to a sultry imagery that engulfs the senses (and not just because of the selective use of 16mm film), the observation at the start is overturned; A film about a woman who was trying not only to be remembered in the future, but also in her own “here-and-now,” invests in the power of cinema to obliterate the experience of linear time, to bring another version of the story to the present, and to prompt us all to confront our responsibilities through methexis.
Screening Schedule

No physical screenings scheduled.
Available at the Agora Market TIFF65.
Direction: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Script: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Cinematography: Alex Ashe
Editing: Emily Packer
Sound: Andrew Tracy
Music: Sabine McCalla
Actors: Zita Hanrot, Motell Foster, Josué Gutierrez
Production: Madame Négritude
Producers: Sophie Luo, Mike S. Ryan
Costumes: Mumbi O’Brien
Production Design: Terry Watson
Make Up: Brianna Perez
Format: DCP
Color: Color
Production Country: USA
Production Year: 2024
Duration: 75'

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich

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.

Filmography

2019 McKayla (short)
2019 Split on the Broom (short)
2023 Conspiracy (short, co-direction)
2024 The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire