https://blackgirlnerds.com/if-i-go-will-they-miss-me-to-make-its-debut-at-the-2026-sundance-film-festival/

At the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, If I Go Will They Miss Me emerges as a quietly powerful meditation on family, memory, and inherited pain told through the eyes of a child learning how to see his father as a human being.

Set in the working-class Watts neighborhood of South Los Angeles, writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández expands his acclaimed 2022 Sundance short (winner of the Short Film Jury Award: U.S. Fiction) into a full-length feature that blends social realism with haunting touches of magical surrealism. The result is a deeply felt portrait of a father and son attempting to bridge an emotional distance shaped by incarceration, masculinity, and unspoken grief.

Twelve-year-old Lil Ant is a sensitive, artistically inclined boy struggling to connect with his father, Big Ant, who has recently returned home from prison. As Big Ant attempts to reintegrate into family life rebuilding trust with his wife Lozita (Danielle Brooks) and learning how to be present for his son Lil Ant begins to experience surreal, almost spectral visions of boys drifting through his neighborhood. These apparitions serve as both a mystery and a metaphor, revealing buried links between past and present, legacy and place.

J. Alphonse Nicholson brings a restrained intensity to Big Ant, capturing the quiet frustration of a man caught between who he was, who he is expected to be, and who his son needs him to become. Danielle Brooks delivers a grounded, emotionally rich performance as Lozita, the stabilizing force holding a fractured family together while navigating her own disappointment and hope.

BGN previously spoke with J. Alphonse Nicholson who stars in the film, during the American Black Film Festival for his directorial debut, Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green, a spiritually resonant, one-man-show-turned-film that established his voice as intimate, poetic, and deeply personal.

Thompson-Hernández audaciously layers the film with allusions to Greek mythology while remaining firmly rooted in documentary-like detail. It’s a story with its head in the clouds but its feet planted on cracked sidewalks and under the constant roar of airplanes passing overhead. The LAX flight path becomes a recurring visual and emotional motif symbolizing escape, absence, and the lingering question of whether anyone notices when you’re gone.

Tender, lyrical, and emotionally precise, If I Go Will They Miss Me is a loving portrait of life in South Los Angeles one that honors the quiet moments where connection is possible, even when words fail.

The film will be available online to the public from January 29 through February 1 as part of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

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