Mercy (2025)

“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.

Writer and Director: Philip Szporer

Movement Creators and Performers: Amara Barner & Angélique Willkie

Movement Director: Ami Shulman

Camera and Editor: Pablo Córdoba Salcido

Music Composer and Sound Designer: Devon Bate

Colour Grading: Arto Paragamian

Producers: Marlene Millar & Philip Szporer, Mouvement Perpétuel

Poet’s Note

“What has started out for me as a poetry cycle – a desire to try to understand the various strands in history that could make a Phillis Wheatley – has turned, thanks to these dancers and video camera, into a meditation on black womanhood. The hands of the dancers are the hands of my mother and sister, the hands of our grandmother, the hands of their mothers. I was aware of how my lines, selected by the dancers, were used to connect their experience, their lives, to Phillis'. You can see it – what starts as language, becomes an unspoken bond between them, becomes the spark that cannot be ground out. Just as Wheatley found her way through, these dancers hold and carry the ache of wanting an ancestor to know her survival was a door and path for their own.” - Cornelius Eady

Director’s Note

"I was drawn to the work of Cornelius Eady, an artist who has never shied from matters of social justice and equity in his body of work. Eady continues to shape the landscape of American literature. We've also been friends for four decades. It was an honour to be given this opportunity to combine his poetry and movement in a film. As a team we dove, through Cornelius' guidance, into the double-voiced discourses of a particular Black literary tradition implicit in his poetry cycle which explores that period of time between the loss of Philiis Wheatley's native West African tongue and its replacement with English. By consequence, we were investigating the issues and complications of race, place, and identity." - Philip Szporer