SUNDANCE 2026
The personal mythologies of a boy in Compton leap from his sketches and from his re-envisioning of his family as Greek gods. He sees his father as Poseidon, a god, but his mother as Medusa, a woman betrayed by them. And that makes him Pegasus. In Walter Thompson-Hernández’s haunted film, these mythic identities aren’t just fantasy—they’re survival. Lil Ant (Bodhi Dell) lives with the weight of absence. Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson) is the father he barely knows, but idolizes through stories that echo through his neighborhood like the constant hum of airplanes overhead. As the story continues, you realize this is Lil Ant’s attempt to connect with a father he can’t seem to get to know. Thompson-Hernández sketches a poetic portrait of the spirits of Black men, mothers who carry the scars of betrayal, and boys who dream of flight, all rendered in quotidian tragedy.
If I Go Will They Miss Me is a meditation on fathers and sons, the quest to break free of past trauma, and mothers like Danielle Brooks’s Lozita, who must decide when and if broken can be mended. It’s a film that refuses to turn pain into spectacle, even as it becomes a Compton allegory, saying: sometimes, to let someone you love fly, you have to let go. And sometimes you have to catch them.
The film glides on the wings of myth, memory, and misfortune, transforming the everyday ache of a boy whose father can’t see past his own pain, into a lyrical meditation on boys and men in the hood—and the hope of breaking generational cycles.
