La Merced

Synopsis

Everyone is at the mercy of something, waiting to reach it or to be reached by it. For the community of carters suppling the kingdom and the needs of the crown, mercy means redeeming work and reward. For Mercedes, mercy means being dependent on a greater will that compels her to see the sea, driving her to defy an unwritten law that for generations has made children an extension of their parents' lives; she steals a family cart loaded with a highly valuable oil for waterproofing ships and drives it to the port of Pasaia. In a journey of adventures between past and future times, between the living and the dead, between the mountains and the coast, her destiny becomes intertwined with a band of pirates who, aboard a ship anchored off the French coast, wait at the mercy of the wind to venture out to sea again.

Biography and Films

Mario Sanz (Burgos, 1991) is a filmmaker who graduated in documentary filmmaking from ECAM, before going on to study under Carlos Muguiro as part of the first generation of Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in the field of creation, where he developed the short film Zehn Minuten vor Mitternacht, which premiered at FIDMarseille 2022, won the Jury Prize at Curtocircuito 2022 and D'A 2023 and was nominated for Best Fiction Short Film for the 2024 Goya Awards.