Fraught, powerful, disturbing, and ceaselessly thought-provoking, Katrine Kjaer’s Mercy Mercy is a highly controversial study on international adoption.
The lives of two families become intertwined as they enter the market for international adoption. In Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, adoption agencies pop up everywhere and western couples gather, looking to adopt local children. A Danish couple, Henriette and Gert, arrive to adopt two children from Ethiopian couple Sinkenesh and Hussen. The two families have different motives for choosing adoption. The African couple wishes to secure a better future for two of their children – and to receive an economic compensation. The Danish couple wishes to realize their dream of becoming parents.
The film follows the process of one adoption from both sides of the globe, during four hard years. We experience the consequences for the biological parents, who are not prepared for the conditions and processes of international adoption, and we follow the Danish couple, who are not prepared to parent two children who already have parents. Finally, it shows how the oldest of the two children, four-year-old Masho, is suffering the detrimental consequences of an adoption gone wrong.
Mercy Mercy offers no easy conclusion to the plight of the children, who appear to be the last priority in the lives of the adults that surround them, and whose attitude to the children’s wellbeing is problematic throughout.