EXCLUSIVE: T A P E Collective has acquired UK rights to The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, the feature debut from visual artist and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, and will release the film in cinemas from July 18th.
Based in part on the essay Surrealist Refugees in the Tropics by Terese Svoboda, the film explores the life and work of Suzanne Césaire, a writer, feminist, and anti-colonial activist from Martinique. Suzanne Césaire was at the heart of the Négritude and Surrealist movements in the Caribbean in the early 20th Century. However, much of her work was overlooked and overshadowed by her husband’s Aime Césaire’s political career, and post WWII, she stopped publishing altogether.
The mysteries of Césaire’s work and life have been an open question of Martiniquan, French, and Caribbean history. Hunt-Ehrlich researched the writer over five years for this film, speaking with family members and biographers alongside reading letters and primary sources.
The film is part narrative and part abstraction. Zita Hanrot stars as an actress and new mother who attempts to grapple with the legacy of the real-life figure she’s supposed to be playing: Suzanne Césaire.
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.
“We are truly honoured to be working with Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, a distinguished artist taking the leap to the big screen as we continue to distribute and screen films which play with form and honour alternative ways of telling stories,” T A P E Collective’s Isra Al Kassi told us in a statement.
“We continue the interrogation of the erasure of women, in particular Black women in cinema, history, and literature – on this occasion it’s Suzanne Cesaire, a woman whose legacy Hunt-Ehrlich captures with a beautiful lens while breaking more than just the fourth wall.”
The post Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s Buzzy Festival Breakout ‘The Ballad Of Suzanne Césaire’ Set For UK Release Via T A P E Collective appeared first on Deadline.
