The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire

Presented with Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich in person for a post-show conversation. 

In this sumptuous, contemplative debut feature, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich reconstructs the life of Suzanne Césaire, the Martinican surrealist writer and feminist activist known for her contributions to the Négritude movement in Paris in the 1930s. Popular narratives surrounding Césaire are somewhat murky; few of her essays and letters have survived into the contemporary period, and history would imply her work was overshadowed by that of her husband, Aimé Césaire. However, some scholarship suggests her reluctance to exist in the public eye was intentional. In Ballad, Hunt-Ehrlich examines the intentionality of Césaire’s private life, capturing the writer through a lens both self-reflexive and generous as the filmmaker ​​grapples with what little material remains of a complex woman who perhaps did not desire to be remembered by history.

Hunt-Ehrlich’s meta-cinematic narrative layers tangible aspects of her own artistic practice—set direction overlapping in the background of scenes, clappers folding and disappearing from the frame—with readings from Césaire’s body of work and reenacments of important moments from the writer’s life. The audience is drawn into the film as if members of the invisible production team, existing on the fringes of the frame, questioning the responsibility and ethicality of our own involvement in Césaire’s private life. Captured in vibrant 16mm, and comprised largely of dreamy, dazzling close-ups of the players and the stormy tropical landscape, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire contrasts the ephemerality of film against the perpetuity of legacy, and actively grapples with the impossibility of capturing an actually-lived life. (Madeleine Hunt- Ehrlich, USA, 2024, 75 minutes, DCP)

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.
 
Presented in partnership with the Caribbean Studies Collective, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago, the University of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies, and the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity.