“How does a woman at the center of history disappear from it?” —Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s deconstructed narrative takes as its subject Suzanne Césaire, a writer and anti-colonial activist from Martinique and a key figure in the 1930s Négritude movement. Hunt-Ehrlich’s first feature reflects on the impossibility of biography and Césaire’s belief in surrealism as a tool for decolonial thinking. Like a mobius, actors and crew confront the history of the writer in her youth and restage scenes from her life, bending the conventions of story-making, the fourth wall, and film production. The “post-biopic” experiments with the process of bringing a woman’s “actually lived life” to film, revolving around the relationships among Césaire, her politician husband, and surrealist writer André Breton. 2024, US, DCP, in English and French with English subtitles, 75 min.
Part of a cinema residency Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich: Evading Capture. Filmmaker, artist, and series curator Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich joins author Rizvana Bradley in conversation following the screening.
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Bios
Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. Bradley is the author of Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), shortlisted for the 2024 MLA Prize for a First Book and named one of the Top Books of 2023 by FRIEZE. Her art criticism has been published in the Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, and Parkett, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues, including for the Serpentine Galleries, the New Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Bradley has curated a number of academic arts symposia, including events at the British Film Institute, the Serpentine Galleries, the Stedelijk Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich makes films concerned with the inner worlds of Black women. Her work has been screened all over the world, including at the 2023 Berlinale, 2022 Venice Biennale, Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, and Whitney Museum of Art. She was named on Filmmaker Magazine’s 2020 “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema List” and is the recipient of a 2023 Herb Alpert Award in Film, 2022 Creative Capital Award, 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, and 2014 Princess Grace Award in film. Her first feature, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, premiered at the 2024 International Film Festival Rotterdam and is selected for the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival and the 2024 New York Film Festival at Film at Lincoln Center.
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