First Trailer For Rotterdam Contender ‘The Ballad Of Suzanne Césaire'

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich will unveil her long researched debut feature The Ballad Of Suzanne Césaire, exploring the legacy of Martinique-born feminist and anticolonial activist at the Rotterdam Film Festival this weekend.

Deadline can reveal the international trailer for the movie which is the fruit of five years of research and trips back and forth to Martinique and Paris to interview the late writer’s relatives.

Hunt-Ehrlich has taken inspiration from this experience for the drama starring French actress Zita Hanrot as an actress and new mother who travels to Martinique to take on the role of Suzanne Césaire and tries to find meaning in her writing in the process.

Hanrot, whose credits include Angry Annie and The Hook-Up Plan, is joined in the cast by Motell Foster, known for his recuring role in Netflix’s Clickbait, and Josué Gutierrez, whose credits include Bloodline.

Born in Martinique in 1915, Césaire was at the forefront of the Négritude and Surrealist movements in the Caribbean in the first half of the 20th century.

The work she published, over the span of just four years in the 1940s, is credited with influencing the likes of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and French writer André Breton, but her legacy was overshadowed by the fame of her husband of 25 years, the poet, writer and politician Aime Césaire.

“She was always writing, she threw her writing away also. What happened to such a promising voice? For me this was the central question of the film: was the choice to keep writing but not to publish a refusal, maybe a higher awareness of the impermanence of the external validation many of her intimate collaborators enjoyed? Was it a darker side effect of the entrenched patriarchy of our society?,” says Hunt-Ehrlich.

The feature is produced by Sophie Luo and Mike S. Ryan.