The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire

THE BALLAD OF SUZANNE CÉSAIRE, the first feature of writer-director Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, reconstructs the life of Caribbean surrealist Suzanne Césaire. The film examines her relationship with her husband, activist, politician and anti-colonialist writer 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. Inspired by the structures of Césaire’s own writing, which often took a colonial convention and unravelled it, the film deconstructs the narrative period biopic genre, moving between a conventional cinema and deconstructed experimental scenes.The film deals with the impossibility of resuscitating a legacy partially lost to time.

“Becoming a mother while reading Suzanne Césaire’s archive, I kept thinking how much the fragmented excerpts found there, filled with a penetrative social and poetic look at the world, must have been constantly interrupted by the demands on her as a mother of her six children, shared with her husband Aimé Césaire. The fragment becomes a central structure of our film and an idea about how cinema can tell stories. Rather than using cinema to smooth the edges of history, here cinema drops us oą the clią where the known runs out. This ballad is a post-modern romance, a biopic that acknowledges the reasons we think about history are always informed by the things we need most in the present.” (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich) (kw)