The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
Saturday, September 28
Sunday, September 29
Friday, October 4
Sunday, October 6
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich in person on Sept. 28 & 29
Secure your tickets with Festival Passes, limited quantities on sale now. NYFF62 single tickets will go on sale to the general public on Tuesday, September 17 at noon ET, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date.
“We are making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered,” says Zita Hanrot, the actress playing an actress grappling with the legacy of the real-life figure she’s supposed to be playing: the Martinique writer Suzanne Césaire. Overshadowed by her husband, the poet and politician Aimé Césaire, Suzanne was a feminist activist as well as a member of the Négritude movement in Paris in the 1930s. For her bold project of reclamation, filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich has taken a metacinematic and mesmerizing approach, using voice-over and direct address to evoke her writing, as well as meditative, immersive 16mm images of forests in Martinique to burrow to the complex truths about a woman, artist, and mother forgotten to history. Uniting Hunt-Ehrlich’s elegant narrative and visual strands is the presence of Hanrot, herself a new mother going through her own reckoning.
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