‘The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire’ Trailer: First Look At Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s Radical Festival Breakout Starring Zita Hanrot

EXCLUSIVE: The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, the feature debut from visual artist and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, is set for a theatrical release next month following a buzzy festival circuit run. You can now check out the film’s first official trailer above and poster below. 

Based in part on the essay Surrealist Refugees in the Tropics by Terese Svoboda, the film follows an actress and new mother (played by Zita Hanrot) who is haunted by voices as she embarks on inhabiting the role of surrealist writer Suzanne Roussi-Césaire. In the sleepy palm groves of the tropics, a small group of filmmakers and actors confront the history of writer Suzanne Césaire in her youth and then stage scenes from her life, troubling the “paradise” of historical memory. 

The official synopsis reads: Moving between narrative filmmaking and abstraction – a night at a 1940s cafe, and the garden where a film’s cast and crew discuss and bring to life the missing pieces of the writer’s legacy – this is a film that leaves room for the unknown.

Suzanne Césaire was a writer, anti-colonial, and feminist activist from Martinique, who was at the forefront of the Négritude and Surrealist movements in the Caribbean during the first half of the 20th century. Césaire would also become an important Surrealist thinker, influencing the likes of painter Wifredo Lam and writer André Reton. However, despite her critical contributions to Caribbean thought and Surrealist discourse, much of her work was overlooked and overshadowed by the largesse of her husband Aime Césaire’s five decades in French politics. Motell Gyn Foster stars alongside Hanrot in the film.

Shot on luminous Kodak 16mm on location in Miami, Florida, and New York, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire debuted at last year’s Rotterdam Film Festival before playing the London, Toronto, and New York Film Festivals. 

Producers on the pic include Sophie Luo and Mike S. Ryan. Haitian-American singer-songwriter Sabine McCalla scored the film. Hunt-Ehrlich directs from a screenplay she also wrote. Her film work has screened at the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, the Whitney in New York, and the Berlin Film Festival. 

Cinema Guild has North America on the pic and will begin a theatrical release on June 6 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) with what they have described as a special 35mm print tour. 

Check out the trailer above and the poster below.