FIDMarseille continues its collaboration with the Lambert Collection, a contemporary art museum based in Avignon. This first event of the year offers you the chance to revisit a film from the 35th edition of FID (2024): The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich. The screening will be followed by a discussion with actress Zita Hanrot.
THE BALLAD OF SUZANNE CÉSAIRE
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
United States, 2024, 74’
FID 2024
Continuing her efforts to unearth previously overlooked chapters in the history of black women, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich tackles the figure of Suzanne Césaire, a largely unknown activist, writer and intellectual. Despite remaining in the shadow of her husband Aimé Césaire and of André Breton, she co-founded the famous review Tropiques, of which she was a key contributing writer and the kingpin, while also being a black woman and a mother. On and around the set of a film about her recreating the 1940s, questions interweave and answer each other. Positions are put in abyme and questioned in the writings of Suzanne Césaire by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich and by the actress who plays her, Zita Hanrot: “How could she have written? she wonders, she who had six children and taught full time”. And paradoxically, she points out to the camera: “We are making a film on an artist who did not want to be remembered”. In this interplay of positions and echoes between eras, the filmmaker makes the fragmented nature of Suzanne Césaire’s writings her own (only her letters and the texts published in the review remain), with extracts spoken and read scattered throughout the film. One of the concerns is to restore the strength and relevance of this situated way of thinking, raising issues that must be addressed today. It’s a travel through various periods and spaces, highlighted by the decision to avoid the illusions of re-enactment. It was shot in a tropical garden in Florida, a place chosen as the meeting point of the Caribbean’s diversity (she wrote about these landscapes) and its diasporic nature. This magnificent film is as much a tribute as an envoi, a way of keeping her thoughts alive.
Nicolas Feodoroff