TRAVELING MERCIES

SOCIAL CINEMA FOUNDATION PRESENTS
TRAVELING MERCIES

The overarching mission of the Social Cinema Foundation is to help youth express themselves through film while learning the film industry. When we read the Traveling Mercies script we knew we had such a story.
Madison Trice, a recent Harvard graduate, was fighting for Affirmative Action in D.C.
Upon our introduction to Madison, she presented her award winning screenplay to us and we knew it was a story that needed to be told. Madison was able to tell her truth and explore how this made her feel.

Social Cinema Foundation wants to continue to give our youths truth a voice and stage. Through the filming of Traveling Mercies, the Foundation was able to teach young people what it takes to make a film by providing hands on teaching opportunities through working with professionals from the industry.
Over several weeks of filming in multiple locations, a truly diverse team was able to work together to make this important film. This project epitomizes the mission of the Social Cinema Foundation and demonstrates the positive impact it is having on our youth.

WRITER'S STATEMENT

Traveling Mercies was first imagined in 2016, when I was a high school senior. It began as a story about a young black couple deeply in love who attend an elite private high school in River Oaks, a wealthy neighborhood in Houston. They attempt to escape the racism they experience at school by pretending to travel elsewhere in the world on weekends and evenings through visiting diverse neighborhoods in Houston.

This story was my attempt to reconcile my own high school experience as a black student who moved to Houston for my sophomore year and attended a predominantly white prep school. Although I found some community and friendship through kind teachers and peers, I was struck by the casual racism from other students and how severely it was overlooked by administrators.

These experiences, combined with the school's academic intensity and with the feeling that I was an outsider, created a sensation that there was no room for any error. This crafted a claustrophobic sense that I still recall vividly. I was not alone in my experience; this struggle echoed by friends who attended similar schools in the south.

Despite the pervasiveness of our experiences, I had never seen a story that focused on black and brown struggles within elite schools throughout the southwest. I created this story with the hope that through this film, what I endured would be faced by fewer students in the future.

To me, this story is intended as both a rebuke to racism in private schools and as an embrace to the victims of this discrimination. It is an attempt to finally bring to light an unsung story that I lived for so long, and to elevate the voices of those who struggled alongside me.

It is an ode to the resiliency of black love amidst pain.