Hard Light Cinema

🌊 Part 4/4 of our Black Atlantic series

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, starring César-award-winning actor Zita Hanrot and Motell Gyn Foster, is inspired by the life and archive of Martinican Surrealist Suzanne Cesaire, a poet and theorist and partner to the poet and politician Aimé Césaire, one of the key founders of the early twentieth-century Negritude movement. The Ballad, a post-biopic, examines her relationship with her husband and famed surrealist André Breton.

Filmed in the space of the film set itself, which was set on the grounds of a tree archive in South Florida, Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich’s first feature shows a small group of actors and crew confronting the history of Césaire in her youth, and staging scenes from her life. In this meta-commentary on filmmaking, the “paradise” of historic and political memory is questioned. Inspired by the structures of Césaire’s own writing, the film deconstructs the narrative period biopic genre, moving between conventional cinema and deconstructed experimental scenes.

— Lewis Peterson, Hard Light Cinema