The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire

An actress and new mother (played by Zita Hanrot) 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. Moving between narrative filmmaking and abstraction - a night at a1940s 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.

ABOUT SUZANNE CÉSAIRE

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 Breton. 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. The mysteries of this influential writer who published for just four years, and never again, have been an open question of Martiniquan, French, and Caribbean history. Filmmaker Hunt-Ehrlich researched the writer for five years in the making of this film, speaking with family members, and biographers as well as reading letters and primary sources. The film is inspired in part by the imagination of Therese Svoboda whose article “Surrealists in the Tropics” brings to life the infamous encounter between the Césaires and famed Surrealist André Breton in Martinique during WWII.