Vancouver Premiere

“Gorgeously allusive … [A] lovely, questing, curious art film … assembled with peculiar, calm exactness.”

Jessica Kiang, Variety

The Surrealists gathered and published in Martinique in the 1940s. They partied and wrote manifestos, and their lives and love affairs became art historical events and legends. Visual artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s first feature film isolates a gap in this history: Suzanne Césaire. It’s a familiar tale in that Césaire’s work, aside from six children and seven essays, is historically invisible—the untraceable labour of teaching, editing, as well as generating ideas that appear in the criticism and poetry of her husband Aimé Césaire until their separation in 1963. Hunt-Ehrlich’s interrogation of this void is maximalist in its tactile method of revisionist restaging. Luxuriant cinematography captures a setting (a tree archive in South Florida) and actors (including Zita Hanrot, a rising star in France) performing in an experiment-friendly, ruminative state. ​“Is it favourable to love?” they ask. Sifting through rehearsals and paratexts, Hunt-Ehrlich traces the paradox of Suzanne’s life.

In English and French with English subtitles

“Imagines decoloniality not as an attempt to ​‘recover’ a concrete history, but as a means of continually remaking history in the present moment through multivalent and speculative modes.”

Cici Peng, Film Comment

“A sumptuous, beguiling feature debut … [Hunt-Ehrlich] offers at once a tropical romance, a political treatise, a work of literary analysis and recuperation, and a manifesto.”

Andréa Picard, TIFF
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