The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire Trailer: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s Striking Debut Arrives in June

A directorial debut as hypnotic as it is narratively destabilizing, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich was one of my favorite discoveries of last year’s New York Film Festival. A post-biopic about Caribbean surrealist Suzanne Césaire, deconstructing the process of bringing an actually-lived life to film, Cinema Guild has picked it up for a June 6 release beginning at BAM, kicking off a special 35mm print tour. Ahead of the release, the first poster and trailer have dropped.

Here’s the synopsis: “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.”

David Katz said in his NYFF review, “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, the feature debut from artist and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, aims to foreground its primary literary material and historical context, but instead directs more attention to its oneiric touches and environmental phenomena––the “wind in the trees,” so to speak. The title figure, together with her more widely known husband Aimé Césaire, were both at the forefront of the négritude movement, which sought to put Francophone literature by colonized peoples in greater dialogue with their African ancestry, and to depict this with a supple, surrealistic view of the world. Assembled from deep research, assistance from academic specialists, and consultations with the Césaire offspring, Hunt-Ehrlich’s bold formal schema still prevents us from fully absorbing these efforts: “feeling” does outpace our full understanding. The vibrant Caribbean music and torch songs on the soundtrack make plain it’s a ballad, not a pedagogic Lecture of Suzanne Césaire.”

See the trailer and poster below.

The post The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire Trailer: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s Striking Debut Arrives in June first appeared on The Film Stage.