Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich On ‘Ballad of Suzanne Césaire’ — Deadline Q&A

Starting this evening, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, the first feature-length work from artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, will begin an extended theatrical release at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a series of rare 35mm engagements.

The film debuted in Competition last year at Rotterdam before embarking on a buzzy festival circuit tour, which included stops in London, Toronto, and New York. It was during this run that I first heard about Ballad. The film had become a significant point of interest for curators, writers, and the cool kids on the circuit, frequently recommended as a “hidden gem” that had to be seen.  

“I’m so glad that people are celebrating and talking about the film,” Hunt-Ehrlich says modestly of the buzz. 

Part narrative and part experimental, Ballad is indeed a unique proposition. Zita Hanrot, the French actress best known for her roles in French-language titles like Fatima (2015), stars alongside Motell Gyn Foster (La cocina). She plays an actress and new mother who attempts to grapple with the legacy of the real-life figure she’s supposed to be playing: Suzanne Césaire. 

Césaire was at the heart of the Négritude and Surrealist movements in the Caribbean in the early 20th Century. However, much of her work was overlooked and overshadowed by her husband Aime Césaire’s political career, and post WWII, she stopped publishing altogether. The mysteries of Césaire’s work and life have been an open question of Martiniquan, French, and wider Caribbean history.

Hunt-Ehrlich has an equally unique professional background, with a collection of film work that has traversed both cinematic and gallery spaces. She has screened work at the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, the Whitney in New York, and the Berlin Film Festival. Here she speaks with us about her approach to the form, the unique, cellouid-focused distribution plan she has cooked up for Ballad with Cinema Guild and plans for her next feature about the “digital death of photography.”

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire opens tonight at BAM. The film opens in the UK next month via TAPE Collective.

DEADLINE: Madeleine, I first heard about you from Ja’Tovia Gary. I interviewed her and she recommended your work. 

MADELEINE HUNT-EHRLICH: I’m a big Ja’Tovia fan as well. We’re inhabiting many overlapping spaces, especially in the States, which is so particular for Black filmmakers and filmmakers working outside the studio system. So we have a lot of solidarity with each other.

DEADLINE: Kristy Matheson at the BFI also recommended Ballad during the London Film Festival. Tell me about this release with Cinema Guild.

HUNT-EHRLICH: We’ve been really lucky to work with Cinema Guild and also now TAPE Collective. And something really exciting about what we are putting together with Cinema Guild, which is a dream come true, is that we have been able to make a 35mm print. So in North America, the screenings, moving forward, are going to center around this print, which is beyond thrilling and close to the intention of the work. 

I work with the cinematographer Alex Ashe and some years ago we were completing a project called Conspiracy with the artist Simone Leigh. Around that point, we decided that we were just going to shoot on film and commit to that discipline, the way it changes how you work with actors, structure your shoot, and think about the frame. But also, because I got into this idea that in the world of cinema, people need to know that images of Black people, our stories, and histories are valuable, and nothing is more precious than celluloid. 

That’s been our central philosophy for several years and across many projects. This is just the first time I’ve had the support to execute that, not just in how we captured the work, but also the viewing experience. So I’m excited and grateful that folks like Cinema Guild and TAPE Collective, who are so smart and visionary in cultivating risk-taking independent cinematic distribution, still exist. You know, what’s interesting to me when it comes to all the doomsday talk around theatrical, and I have my days too, but I’ll go to a repertoire screening of a B movie from the 1970s, and they’re so well attended. People want to see prints. People want to go to the cinema. In some ways, that part of theatrical is actually quite healthy.

DEADLINE: I agree. The most popular film programme in London right now is a rep season at the BFI of Black women filmmakers. Aside from that, I think cinematic language has never been more relevant. Even with things like TikTok, it’s popular because it has editing software embedded in the app. That’s all cinema.  

HUNT-EHRLICH: The problem is that there’s a lot of labor in film. Our film, in part, tries to think about the history of the surrealist Suzanne Césaire, who was from Martinique. She was a feminist writer and mother who primarily produced work during World War 2. But the film is also about a group of people today on a film set, doing the labor of remembering and making images, and it tries to make that labor visible within the film as one of the textures of the film. Making films takes a lot of labor. I still want that to happen. A component of that requires business. It’s very different in Europe compared to the States, in terms of there being some commitment and understanding on a national level that the things that make us human and make life meaningful have always come out through artistic expression. 

In the States, that is very fragile to almost nonexistent, so there’s a lot of pressure on the commercial market to completely scaffold art making. And if you’re thinking only in a commercial context, there is a real impetus to minimize the labor that goes into production. That’s when things like TikTok are great. You can cut out all the labor positions. You don’t even actually have to pay. You can figure out the financial model and the distribution yourself, and it’s probably just you and a friend, and maybe that will be cinema. I disagree. I really love garage bands, but I also really love the orchestra, and I still want there to be films like the orchestra.

DEADLINE: On that note, how was the process of building this production? We rarely see radical work like this at such a scale.

HUNT-EHRLICH: You have to have a little bit of blind faith, some Don Quixote-ism to yourself to make anything because it’s all impossible. I know there’s an audience. I believe that so strongly, and then I’m open and interested in several spaces, which allows me to connect many possible institutions, patrons, and collaborators. I’m not reliant on any one particular arena within cinematic production. So it includes the art world and independent film. Some of what I’m doing includes a branded, commercial, or fashion element. What’s important is the work. If we all align on the work, several stakeholders can come together, and filmmakers must think that way in the States. You cannot be a one-horse filmmaker in the United States. Perhaps that’s possible in a European Film funding context, but not in the U.S.. And there are a lot of filmmakers in the U.S. working this way, like Ja’Tovia Gary. I in no way feel alone. Many of us are out here, and we’re going to make our films however we can, without sacrificing great cinema.

DEADLINE: And can you tell me about striking this 35mm print? Did you do that in the States?

HUNT-EHRLICH: Yes, it was a collaboration with Cinema Guild and Colorlab in the States. We shot on Super 16, and they blew it up for the 35 print. We also moved into Dolby surround sound, which is going to be amazing because the film relies so much on this really lush sonic world, as well as the music of Sabine McCalla.

DEADLINE: Sabine is awesome. I love her music. 

HUNT-EHRLICH: I’m putting it out there for any angel investors, my next dream is to make a vinyl print of Sabine McCalla’s music from the film. I collaborated with Sabine. She is a Haitian American singer-songwriter. She works a lot with her own songs as well as archival songs. We have some songs in the film that bring to life the idea of this ballad and the melancholic and romantic world that the film exists in. You can’t hear the songs anywhere but in the film, and they’re just so amazing. So that’s my little pitch. I’d love to print a vinyl.  

There is no path to follow with the work I create. I’ve just been trusting that people still want to see things on celluloid and buy records. We still want these intimate experiences with art. Nothing can beat that. Technology will change forever, but we’re still going to treasure and seek out these moments that are meaningful to us. The work that I do works really well on those registers. So it’s about making sure that the whole way through, you have a process that has integrity, so those are the experiences you’re offering people. I’m not Harmony Korine. That’s a different filmmaker. I’m not going to accelerate with the tech. I’m going to offer you your record player. And people need both.

DEADLINE: You speak so clearly about your belief in a traditional relationship with the arts. But your work, particularly Ballad, all feels to be a sharp subversion of how people have historically thought about and approached image making. So what do you find useful in that tradition?

HUNT-EHRLICH: In all honesty, I am trying to make new things, and sometimes you do that by putting together a number of old things that don’t always go together. And the idea of texture is very important to my work. There’s something about digital that tries to get rid of texture. And it’s a mistake. I’m friends with the designer Rachel Scott of Diotima, and she talks a lot about how important craft is in her designs and clothes. And by craft, she meant the material of the textile and the process used, like crochet. Recently, she said to me that crochet cannot be machine-replicated. And so to her, that is true luxury. What’s an example of that in film? It’s everything from the material celluloid to the fact that a group of people got together to make a photographic image.

DEADLINE: Was it difficult to explain your intention and philosophy to your cast? 

HUNT-EHRLICH: We had the most amazing cast. I worked with the casting director Emily Rucker, and Zita Hanrot is our lead. She’s a French-Jamaican actress and has had a very long career. She’s been in a lot of films and television, primarily in the French marketplace, and is truly a once-in-a-generation talent — a profound artist and an amazing collaborator. She was a new mother at the time, and so was I. We did a lengthy rehearsal process together where our journeys as new mothers constantly became a focus. I began rewriting the script based on our conversations. All the actors we worked with were like that. They came to the material with a real interest in reading, thinking, and studying, as well as rehearsing and finding the right note to hit. Your collaborators are always very important. I have a new script, and I’m working with some of the same producers and some new collaborators. I’m trying to build the scale up a little, and it’s interesting because it is very important to find collaborators who share your values.

DEADLINE: Martinique is central to Ballad. Can you talk a little about mounting a production around the Caribbean? Sadly, in our contemporary scene of global Black cinema, it feels like the Caribbean is often sidelined.  

HUNT-EHRLICH: Yeah, I’ve felt a distinct support for the film from folks in the UK, and I think that’s partly because there’s such a strong Caribbean community there. So there’s a clear understanding of how important the Caribbean is to Blackness. But also in understanding the world we live in today. It’s at the front line of global warming. It’s also really the birthplace of capitalism. So it’s a place where people have been talking about these things for as long as the Caribbean has been a thing. It’s an old conversation there, just as it is for those of us who have that as part of our background. We know how important this is. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is Shakespeare in Love for those who know.

DEADLINE: That should be your tagline for the posters. How will the 35mm engagements work? You begin at BAM on June 6. Will the print then travel?

HUNT-EHRLICH: Yeah, we also have screenings of varying engagement lengths planned in Chicago and LA. The other major engagement will be in London and the UK with TAPE Collective. Then this print will continue to circulate over the next couple of years as part of singular engagements. Then I hope the film will be available in the dreaded digital universe.

DEADLINE: You briefly mentioned your next project—can you tell us what you’re working on?

HUNT-EHRLICH: I’m writing a narrative feature. It’s about the digital death of photography, but it’ll be shot on celluloid. I started in photography. It was my first great love, and I’ve been grieving its end. I don’t know if you feel the same way. But I’m curious if in 50 years we will hold photographs outside of a museum. It’s really sad. It’s such a young medium and one of the most psychologically influential. I don’t know if there’s ever been a medium that had such a great force in changing human psychology as photography did. It changed our entire sense of ourselves, our families, and our memories. It’s fascinating to imagine: if there’s a digital end to it, what happens to our psychologies? It’s an interesting question. So I’ve been working on a love story that centers on this, and thinking about what we will still want to photograph. What kind of photographs will we still want to hold in our hands, if any?

I’m working with many of the same producers again, alongside some new companies, so I’m excited to continue developing and building. I’ve made many short films, and someone once told me that it’s very important for Black women filmmakers, in particular, to make feature-length work. A lot of why the understanding of a canon or tradition of Black women’s cinema is so limited is because it’s been so hard for us to make features, and because the way films are canonized is through feature-length work. I’m clear about that. Having a print of Ballad is important to me. And I’m thinking about how the next work can also live within this feature-length palette.