Movie Meetup — The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire — Meet from 7:15, film at 8:30

We're going to see Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s debut feature The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire.

We'll meet in the Watershed cafe/bar from 7:15 pm, to say hello and chat. After the film, we will stop for a while to share thoughts and reactions.

Buy your own ticket from the box office or online.

ABOUT THE FILM

"It is both much too big and way too small to describe Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich‘s gorgeously allusive The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire as a biopic."
— Jessica Kiang, Variety

"We’re making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered. These words summarise beautifully the contradiction at the heart of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s thoughtful debut feature The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire. They’re spoken by an actor (Zita Hanrot) hired to play the French-Martinican writer Césaire, in an adaptation of her life. Rather than presenting that film, Hunt-Ehrlich offers a deconstructed anti-biopic, an elliptical reflection on the mechanics of memory.

"Shot on vivid 16mm, The Ballad moves slowly and deliberately. Amidst the lush greenery of a tropical park a film crew gather, struggling to make sense of their subject. Cast and crew read extracts from Césaire’s writing and testimonies from her family, while new mother Hanrot is distracted from work by the sound of her crying baby. (Suzanne had six children, and worked full-time as a schoolteacher; how did she write at all? Hanrot wonders). Re-enactments – Aime at a political meeting, an encounter between Breton and the Césaires – offer glimpses of the maybe-film in making. Chronologies disconnect, time collapses; our heroine remains slippery and unknowable."
— Rachel Pronger, BFI Sight & Sound