A writer and thinker too innovative to be captured in a conventional biopic, the Martinican activist and author Suzanne Césaire is as much the creative partner as she is the subject of The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire. The film imagines an actress preparing to play Césaire, and encountering and re-examining her own ideas about creativity, love, Black identity, and politics as a result.

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.

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 the 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.

Sponsored by the Film, English, French, and Africana Studies Departments. 

This event is open to the public.