Set in the working-class Watts neighborhood in South Los Angeles, writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández’s moving family drama focuses on a fraught father-son relationship. Big Ant is just out of prison and struggling to reconnect with his wife Lozita (Danielle Brooks), and adolescent son Lil Ant, a sensitive artist who begins to see surreal, almost spectral visions of boys drifting around his neighborhood. Thompson-Hernández audaciously combines social and magical realism, charting the emotional trajectory of a conflicted dad and his restless son. Dense with allusions to Greek mythology, but grounded in documentary detail, the film has its head in the clouds without losing sight of the street-level conditions that shape its characters’ lives. IF I GO WILL THEY MISS ME is a loving, lyrical portrait of life under the LAX flight path.
“Poetic, artful, and deeply atmospheric…. A film filled with heart, beauty, and tenderness that resonates quietly but deeply.” —Jamie Broadnax, Black Girl Nerds “Informed and influenced by the works of Black filmmakers like Charles Burnett, Kahlil Joseph, Barry Jenkins, and Spike Lee, as well as visual artists like Jacob Lawrence and Kerry James Marshall, Thompson-Hernández brings considerable rigor to his sophomore feature. His frame exhibits a restrained beauty that honors and uplifts, rather than condescends to, its environment; in other words, he respects his audience.” —Vikram Murthi, IndieWire “Aiming to establish a new idiom to represent the community and conditions in which he was raised, the journalist-turned-director (whose instinct is to point the camera at people commonly overlooked) channels elements of surrealism, modern dance and Greek mythology that have never been combined in quite this way before.” —Peter Debruge, Variety
