Hard Light Cinema Presents: The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024)

Come to the ICA auditorium for a screening of The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, directed by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (2024). Starring César-award-winning actor Zita Hanrot and Motell Gyn Foster, the film is inspired by the life and archive of Martinican surrealist Suzanne Césaire, a poet and theorist and partner to the poet and politician Aimé Césaire, one of the key founders of the early twentieth-century Negritude movement. This post-biopic examines her relationships with her husband, Aimé, and the famed surrealist André Breton. Filmed on the grounds of a palm tree archive in South Florida, Hunt-Ehrlich’s first feature shows a small group of actors and crew confronting the history of Césaire in her youth, and staging scenes from her life. In this meta-commentary on filmmaking, the “paradise” of historic and political memory is questioned. Inspired by the structures of Césaire’s own writing, the film deconstructs the narrative period biopic genre, moving between conventional cinema and deconstructed experimental scenes.

Doors 6 p.m. | Screening 7 p.m.

Series Description:
More than twenty years have passed since the scholar Paul Gilroy coined the framework of the “Black Atlantic” to describe a counterculture within modernity emerging from Black American, European, and African diasporic cultures. Given that these hybrid cultures feature prominently in the ICA’s exhibition offerings this season, the institute has partnered with the Hard Light Cinema collective to present four films that contextualize and deepen our understanding of Black Atlantic aesthetics and experience.

Additional screenings: Wednesday, October 22, Babylon, directed by Franco Rossi (1980); Wednesday, November 19, Atlantics, directed by Mati Diop (2019); Tuesday, December 2, Lovers Rock, directed by Steve McQueen (2020).