At the core of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s vibrant and vital body of work over the last decade is a continual drive to center the often-overlooked lives of Black women. Negotiating a line between visibility and opacity, Hunt-Ehrlich’s films balance historical research with poetic form. Through layered and fragmented storytelling, her subjects, who range from artists to groups organizing during the Underground Railroad, serve not just as reflections upon history, but also as lenses through which to understand the present.
Hunt-Ehrlich’s cinema residency at the Walker is inspired by her first feature film, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire. Described by the artist as a “post-biopic,” the film mirrors the surrealist and decolonial thinking of its titular subject, a writer and anti-colonial activist from Martinique who was a key figure in the 1930s Négritude movement, to make a deconstructed biography.
Building on this, the artist will use her cinema residency to further think through questions on Black women and desire that emanate from her film. The series will also present two screenings in the cinema as historical touchpoints: Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva, starring opera singer Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, and Stig Björkman’s Georgia, Georgia, written by Maya Angelou. A third component of her residency will manifest in the Walker Reader, with a series of interviews with artists on the subject of Black women and desire.
ABOUT MADELEINE HUNT-EHRLICH
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.
Diva by Jean-Jacques Beineix
Friday–Saturday, April 4–5, 7 pm
Walker Cinema
$15 ($12 Walker members, seniors, and students); free for students on Friday
Jules (Frédéric Andréi), a young postman, is obsessed with a diva, the never-recorded African American opera star Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez). After bootlegging one of her haunting arias, Jules befriends a teenage record-store thief and finds sanctuary in a Parisian artist’s loft. A cassette tape mix-up precipitates suspenseful entanglements among the moped-riding youth, the artists, the police, and international gangsters in this stylish, chase-filled pop thriller from the director of Betty Blue. 1982, France, 35mm, in French with English subtitles, 117 min.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Friday, May 2, 7 pm
Walker Cinema
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors); free for students
“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.
Filmmaker, artist, and series curator Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich joins author Rizvana Bradley in conversation following the screening.
Georgia, Georgia by Stig Björkman
Saturday, May 3, 7 pm
Walker Cinema
$15 ($12 Walker members, seniors, and students)
Written and scored by Maya Angelou, Georgia, Georgia is one of the earliest known feature films produced from a Black woman’s screenplay. The story follows pop singer Georgia Martin (Diana Sands) and her inner circle of companions on a tension-filled three-day tour in Sweden. Exhausted by the pressures and publicity, the tragic character sings of love and pain while pursued by a Black Vietnam vet and a white American photographer (Dirk Benedict). 1972, Sweden/U.S., 35mm, 91 min.
Filmmaker, artist, and series curator Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich will introduce the film.
35mm print courtesy Swedish Film Institute.