The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire French Film Festival

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
(Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, 2024, 75 min, USA, English and French w/English subtitles, DCP)

“We are making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered,” says Zita Hanrot, the actress playing an actress grappling with the legacy of the real-life figure she’s supposed to be playing: the Martinique writer Suzanne Césaire. Overshadowed by her husband, the poet and politician Aimé Césaire, Suzanne was a feminist activist as well as a member of the Négritude movement in Paris in the 1930s. For her bold project of reclamation, filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich has taken a metacinematic and mesmerizing approach, using voice-over and direct address to evoke her writing, as well as meditative, immersive 16mm images of forests in Martinique to burrow to the complex truths about a woman, artist, and mother forgotten to history. Uniting Hunt-Ehrlich’s elegant narrative and visual strands is the presence of Hanrot, herself a new mother going through her own reckoning.

“Hunt-Ehlich’s lovely, questing, curious art film cannot singlehandedly redress Césaire’s omission from the annals. But it does suggest that if posterity has forgotten her, it’s only with its conscious mind, where “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire” is piped in from the collective unconscious. Perhaps, when history sleeps on those who shaped it, this is what it dreams.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety