An Interview with Writer/Director/Producer Penelope Lawson
We chat with Penelope Lawson about her short film, The Dinner Party, her experience founding her own production company, and fun cinema.

The Phantoms is a television movie inspired by the heart-warming, real-life events surrounding the 2009 New Brunswick provincial championship victory by the Bathurst High School (BHS Phantoms) boys varsity basketball team, a year after a terrible road accident takes the lives of seven players and the coach’s wife. In the following school year, as tragedy hangs over the community, the BHS Phantoms are reconstituted. The ragtag bunch of players gels as a team, and manages to lift community spirit on the long road to the provincial basketball finals.
We chat with Penelope Lawson about her short film, The Dinner Party, her experience founding her own production company, and fun cinema.
If you are a discerning movie watcher and/or an African-American with a modicum of Black consciousness, this film isn’t for you. It would be better to watch the documentary ‘They Fight’ to see the impactful, emotional story of Walter Manigan and the young men of DC’s Ward 8.
Even without the messaging, Mercy does not hold up as a movie. It's sloppily done and the mystery doesn’t tie together at the end.
This comedy brings a big surprise to Josh and his family when they move to New York City and struggle to adapt to their new friend.
The film is a simple love story reminiscent of stories like The Notebook released in 2004. Sylvie and Robert are rarely actually together in the film, however; time and circumstance keep them away from each other, and the audience waits with bated breath to see them find one another over and over.
In all actuality, “Just Mercy” should be labeled a “wall punching narrative.” Constantly, the flick throws high forms of adversity our way, amping up our most inner levels of discomfort. Filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton wonderfully paces the film in such a way that replicates the slow-burn nature of justice.