Rating: NR | Runtime: 75 minutes
Release Date: 2025 (USA)
Studio: The Cinema Guild
Director(s): Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich
Writer(s): Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich & Marina Magloire

We are making a film about an artist who did not want to be remembered.

I often struggle with TIFF Wavelengths titles and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is no exception. To fit in that program means to be abstract. Experimental. Non-narrative. And while all those things are fine—my brain simply can’t always get onboard. This is especially true when the work is so esoteric and open-ended that I can’t for the life of me understand what’s really going on until I read the synopsis and/or director’s statement to explain what it is the film itself does not.

To go in blind is to see what appears to be two actors playing two characters: Zita Hanrot as Suzanne Césaire and Motell Gyn Foster as her husband Aimé. To keep watching, however, past all the gorgeous visuals and wonderful soundtrack (courtesy of Sabine McCalla), is to find the camera expanding the frame beyond the fictional. Suddenly Hanrot and Foster are speaking in their own voices. Or reading from pages strewn about the jungle. We see a production truck. Watch crew members take light readings. And meet a crying newborn baby. The blurring lines between performance and documentary demand guidance.

Maybe that’s just me, though. Only when I read how it depicts “an actress and new mother haunted by voices as she embarks on inhabiting the role of Suzanne Césaire” do I even start to see the connections. It still doesn’t quite help everything gel, but I finally have some footing with which to begin to interpret the whole as more than just disjointed vignettes of Césaire’s words and those of the filmmaker. Without it, the film proves to be little more than vibes to me. And that’s okay too. I know a lot of people who love this type of formal experiment to dive into, it’s just not my cup of tea.

It’s ultimately a very personal piece of art that depicts Hunt-Ehrlich’s relationship with Césaire’s writing and life. A look into her mind to get to the heart of her experience with it and its resulting meaning and impact. So, I’d recommend hearing her contextualize it first before viewing. Much like an art exhibit comes with a booklet of intent and purpose. Without that it’s just an effective sensorial event that disappears from my consciousness the moment it’s complete.

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Motell Gyn Foster and Zita Hanrot in THE BALLAD OF SUZANNE CÉSAIRE; courtesy of TIFF.