Saturday, October 3, 2026
11AM-1PM EST
Atlanta Contemporary
535 Means Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30318
Join Burnaway and Atlanta Contemporary on Saturday, October 3rd from 11AM-1PM at Atlanta Contemporary for the first Atlanta screening of the 2024 film The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s directorial debut features an actress and new mother preparing to inhabit the role of influential Martinican writer and thinker Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, who had a key role in the formation of the Négritude and Surrealist movements in the early 20th century. The screening will be followed by a discussion and Q&A between scholars Margy Adams and Joslyn Gardner, who study the relationship between Afro-Caribbean and Black American texts, and literatures and visual cultures of the African diaspora and the French-speaking Caribbean, respectively.
About the Film
An actress and new mother (played by Zita Hanrot) is haunted by voices as she embarks on inhabiting the role of surrealist writer Suzanne Roussi-Césaire. In the sleepy palm groves of the tropics, a small group of filmmakers and actors confront the history of writer Suzanne Césaire in her youth and then stage scenes from her life, troubling the “paradise” of historical memory. Moving between narrative filmmaking and abstraction – a night at a 1940s cafe, and the garden where a film’s cast and crew discuss and bring to life the missing pieces of the writer’s legacy – this is a film that leaves room for the unknown. This is Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s first feature. The film stars César-award-winning actor Zita Hanrot and Motell Foster, and features a soundtrack by singer Sabine McCalla.
About Suzanne Césaire
Suzanne Césaire was a writer, anti-colonial, and feminist activist from Martinique, who was at the forefront of the Négritude and Surrealist movements in the Caribbean during the first half of the 20th century. Césaire would also become an important Surrealist thinker, influencing the likes of painter Wifredo Lam and writer André Breton. However, despite her critical contributions to Caribbean thought and Surrealist discourse, much of her work was overlooked, and overshadowed by the largesse of her husband Aime Césaire’s five decades in French politics.
The mysteries of this influential writer who published for just four years, and never again, have been an open question of Martiniquan, French, and Caribbean history. Filmmaker Hunt-Ehrlich researched the writer for five years in the making of this film, speaking with family members, and biographers as well as reading letters and primary sources. The film is inspired in part by the imagination of Therese Svoboda whose article “Surrealists in the Tropics” brings to life the infamous encounter between the Césaires and famed Surrealist André Breton in Martinique during WWII,
About Margy Adams
Margy Adams is a Black feminist writer, teacher, and artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work combines Black sound studies, performance theory, Caribbean philosophy, and humor studies to investigate literary and cultural constructions of race and language in Black American and Afro-Caribbean literature. She received her Ph.D. in English from Emory University where her dissertation, now book manuscript, Sound Bites: The Sonics of Afro-Experimental Fiction, studies texts that exceed and challenge genre conventions through Black writers’ attention to sound.
About Joslyn Gardner
Joslyn Gardner is a PhD candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University where she is a Centennial Scholar and Writing Center Fellow. Her work broadly focuses on the literatures and visual cultures of the African diaspora and, more particularly, of the French-speaking Caribbean. She is currently writing her dissertation titled “Beautiful Camouflage: A Black Feminist Archive of the Wreck.” Her article “Maud Sulter’s Image-Making: The Rising of Jeanne Duval’s Ka” was published in Callaloo (43(1), 2025). She co-founded and co-runs the Emory Black Feminist Working Group.