If I Go Will They Miss Me

Twelve-year-old Lil Ant waits longingly for his father Big Ant, who is returning after many years in prison to Watts, the troubled Los Angeles neighbourhood. The boy worships his father like a hero. In his eyes, even family members turn into figures from Greek mythology. The father becomes Poseidon, the mother Medusa, while above the houses of Watts boys float like ghosts. But Big Ant is no god, rather a man wrestling with his past. He fears Lil Ant could make the same mistakes he did, and can barely return his son’s affection.

In “If I Go Will They Miss Me”, director Walter Thompson-Hernández expands his short film, which won an award at Sundance in 2022, into a feature. In its gentleness, his view of Black lives recalls Barry Jenkins’s masterpiece “Moonlight”. Thompson-Hernández searches with great tenderness for what father and son cannot say to one another. But he is interested not only in the vulnerability of his characters but also in their right to fantasy. Greek gods belong to Watts here just as much as the aeroplanes in the sky. A magical-realist dream of a film that sets the freedom of a child’s imagination against the familiar, cliché-ridden images of misery. After the world premiere at Sundance, jury prizes followed in Dallas and Bentonville, among other places.