During the Fellowship, 2022 CCI Artist Fellow Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich worked on the production of her film project focused on the legacy of writer, anticolonial, and feminist activist Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, and the installation version of this experimental narrative artwork titled Too Bright to See (Part I), which premiered at PAMM in April 2023. In shooting the film, Hunt-Ehrlich collaborated with actors, musicians, and community members from the Francophone and Caribbean diaspora in Florida.  

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is a filmmaker and artist who has undertaken projects in Miami, the five boroughs of New York City, and Kingston, Jamaica. Her work has been screened all over the world, including at the 2022 Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has been awarded special jury prizes for best experimental film at the BlackStar Film Festival and the New Orleans Film Festival. She was listed among Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema List 2020” and is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award (2022), SFFILM Rainin Grant (2020), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2019), UNDO Fellowship (2019), and a Princess Grace Award in film (2014).  

Click here to read “Working Toward Suzanne: A Conversation between Terri Francis and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich” where they discuss the vision and form behind the creative construction of Too Bright to See (Part I). 

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s Too Bright to See (Part I) has also been featured in Seen, a journal of film, art, and visual culture, dedicated to rigorous writing by and about Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Click here to read “Acts of Camouflage: On Suzanne Roussi Césaire” written by Yasmina Price.