The directing duo of Pat Heywood and Jamil McGinnis rolled out this short film created for the seventh season of Motionpoems, a nonprofit that turns poetry into film. The short is an adaptation of the poem “Things I Carry Into the World” by Cynthia Manick. It’s an abstract meditation on the body, the feminine, the everyday realities of being young and black, and the fragility between the manmade and the natural. Heywood and McGinnis worked with a nonprofit, Urban Word NYC, who connected them with four poets: Esther Aloba, Nkosi Nkululeko, Makayla Posely, and Trace DePass. The scenes featuring these poets are actually adaptations of their own poems, heard briefly in the opening scene.
Different companies–including The Mill, Cosmo Street, Sonic Union, Heard City and Smuggler–were involved in helping to make the project happen.
McGinnis is an associate producer at Droga5 while Heywood is a coordinator at Smuggler. The two met when they briefly worked at Saatchi & Saatchi and eventually came together as a new directing team.
Heywood and McGinnis ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the project which made its online premiere on NOWNESS.
