Photo of Suzanne Cesaire ID card above Aime Cesaire’s desk.
Photo of dark studio for Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire.
Photo of the jungle in Martinique for Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire.
Photo for Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is a filmmaker and artist, who blends narrative and documentary traditions to create vivid, form-forward cinema.
Artist BioHow does a woman at the center of history disappear from it? For years the impact of Suzanne Césaire, one of the mothers of négritude, was overshadowed by the fame of her husband Aimé Césaire. Informed by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s interviews with the living children and family of Suzanne, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire brings to life the images we might have had if history had been recorded differently. Moving between narrative-style treatments, contemporary vérité and archival material, the film circles the fate of Suzanne’s missing writings.
Creative Capital Carnival 2022
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Brooklyn, NY
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is a filmmaker and artist, who blends narrative and documentary traditions to create vivid, form-forward cinema. Her work has screened all over the world, including at The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New Orleans Film Festival, Doclisboa, True/False Film Festival, and BlackStar Film Festival. She was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 2020 “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema.” She is the recipient of a 2020 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, a 2019 UNDO/Ford Foundation fellowship, a 2015 TFI Future Filmmaker Award, and a 2014 Princess Grace Award in film. Her first feature film The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire has received support from San Francisco Film Society’s Rainin Grant for the screenwriting phase and was a 2020 finalist at Biennale College Cinema, the Venice Film Festival’s prestigious film lab.