Mercy

“The hands of the dancers are the hands of my mother and sister, the hands of our grandmother, the hands of their mothers.” These words of celebrated American poet Cornelius Eady serve as an anchor for the short film Mercy that weaves poetry and imagery, with gesture, movement and voice into an intricate meditation on black womanhood. Eady’s eponymous cycle of poems is informed by the writing of Phillis Wheatley, the first enslaved person in the American Colonies to publish a full-length volume of poems. The poetic short, directed by Philip Szporer, voices issues of race, place, and identity, and dives into the double-voiced discourses of a particular Black literary tradition concerning the complication of the slave learning their captor’s language.