In the soundtrack of his youth, Walter Thompson-Hernández and his friends liked to devise a game of escape. Extending their arms in a v-formation at their side, they would race down the street on weekend afternoons imagining the freedom of the airplanes soaring across the blue infinity of their Huntington Park neighborhood.

Thompson-Hernández never lost that sense of dreaming. This month, he made his feature-length debut at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival with “If I Go Will They Miss Me,” a film of audacious sight and attentive storytelling that unfolds from the perspective of its protagonist Lil Ant, a Watts-raised, 12-year-old obsessed with airplanes and Greek mythology. Where coming-of-age stories often confront the crush of innocence — the fracture and shock of stolen virtue — Thompson-Hernández instead renders one about preservation. A preservation, in part, held together by Lozita (Danielle Brooks), a mom and wife working to keep her family whole now that Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson) is home from prison.

The film isn’t trying to absorb or recklessly mirror the traumas of the Black family so much as make a case for its nuance. In “If I Go,” Thompson-Hernández scraps the three-act structure for something more novelistic, a risk that a lesser director might have fumbled but one he turns into a profound taxonomy on grace. It is a story that interrogates — with a searching and brutal tenderness — the how, why and who of our emotional being. Even as Lil Ant yearns to be closer to his father, what the film doesn’t do is beg you to empathize with the conditions that its characters war against; instead, it demands that you simply acknowledge their presence, their wounds and their dreaming.

Walter Thompson-Hernández, director of “If I Go Will They Miss Me.”

(Michael “Cambio” Fernandez)

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Thompson-Hernández’s cinematic canvas recalls a Los Angeles rarely afforded witness on screen. You won’t find any wasted thinking about the tired pathologies of urban decay; the film takes pleasure in depicting Black Angelenos in the fullness of their complexity, celebrating the toil and wonder of how people come together and fall apart, of how love is broken and remade. “There’s already a lyricism that exists in each of our lives,” he tells me. “In how we speak, in how our bodies move through the world, and how we touch each other. I’m sensitive to that.”

Though today he primarily works in the medium of film, Thompson-Hernández has a kaleidoscopic approach to craft. A former journalist for the New York Times, he’s as comfortable writing about the legacy of Black cowboys in Southern California (his 2020 book, “The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland,” was a New York Times bestseller) as he is directing a Beats By Dre commercial for the Super Bowl or shooting a sports documentary for Netflix. In 2025, his Portuguese-language film “Kites” — a story about personal reclamation in favelas of Rio de Janeiro — won the Special Jury Mention for Viewpoints at the Tribeca Film Festival. What Thompson-Hernández’s art so easily dispels, no matter the genre it finds a home in, are all the knotty, misguided and trite representations of otherness in our contemporary world. He is a seer of the unseen.

(Vladimir Santos) (Kemal Cilengir)

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Jason Parham: A major theme in the film wrestles with what it means to find your place at home when you return. Was that a personal story?

Walter Thompson-Hernández: So much happens to the figures in our lives who travel away from us and eventually come back home. Thematically, this movie is about flight and transportation — both the physical flights that one takes, but also the emotional and spiritual flights. Big Ant, the father [character], returns after doing a stint in prison, but what his son sees as a Grecian 10-year war. That’s been my relationship to so many of the men who I grew up around.

JP: How so?

WTH: They would be gone for a while and we wouldn’t know where they would be. Then they would just show up after two or three or four years. We’d ask questions. It would be, “So-and-so was locked up” or “So-and-so had to go away for a while but now he’s back.” Greek mythology became a North Star for understanding very complicated characters in my own life.

JP: Why was that sense of imagination important to explore?

WTH: The aperture from which I lived my life was very small. It was a very contained world that only existed around a few geographic locations and a few blocks. Eventually I was able to leave. But very few of us get to make it out. Which is a weird sentence — get to make it out — because so many people want to be here and come here all the time. But there are those of us that got the chance to travel and to essentially fly. The older I got, the more I realized how small my world was as a child, but also how expansive and imaginative it was. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book “Between the World and Me,” there’s a passage that I always think about. I’m paraphrasing, but he tells his son something to the extent of — James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, those are yours. And then he says Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky and Simone de Beauvoir — listing all these European artists and thinkers — those are also yours. I’m extending that care and grace to the boy in this movie. A lot of us, we don’t get to dream in that way as Black or brown boys in L.A.

JP: What did young Walter dream about?

WTH: Our home was right in between both LAX flight paths. The sound of these airplanes is something that I’ll never forget. My mom and aunts still live in that neighborhood. When I go back, I forget how strong the sound of the airplanes are, how abrasive and all-encompassing. As a child, I was drawn to the mystery of them — where they were coming from and where they were going. I would imagine who was in them. My friends and I, we made up games where we would race airplanes on our bikes or we’d sprint down the block extending our arms. They had this power over us. The movie is me making sense of that mystery and beauty while also understanding that I have asthma because of them.

JP: You’re referring to the health complications people suffer from in areas downwind of the flight paths.

WTH: Cancer rates and asthma are so prevalent among the people who I grew up around. There is an irony in airplanes. On one hand, we can dream about them and all the places they can take us, but the tangible effects are that they are harming us. Jet fuelers, all those things. As children, how do we wrestle with those complex ideas, while on the ground wrestling with complex ideas about adolescence, about our parents. To say growing up under the LAX flight path is a complicated experience, there’s so much truth in that. Taking the mythology of these airplanes and applying that to the mythology that we create about adults in our lives is something that I hope people really feel in this movie.

JP: There are a lot of smart technical choices in the film, from the sound to the set design. Who were your influences?

WTH: I could reference films like “Killer of Sheep” or “The Battle of Algiers” or “Gummo” or “He Got Game”; there’s a list of at least 50 movies. But there’s something about looking at a Jacob Lawrence painting that offers me the biggest inspiration in terms of the dexterity and freedom and elasticity of Black bodies in space. There’s something about painting as a medium for me that lives outside of the limits of photography and film. There aren’t a lot of barriers and boundaries to how painters experience the world. Whether it’s Jacob Lawrence or Henry Taylor or Winfred Rembert or Kerry James Marshall. I obviously study literature, photography and film, but painting is where I go for ideas around framing and composition.

(Vladimir Santos)

JP: The film plays with different interpretations of light. How would you describe your relationship to light?

WTH: I am so drawn to natural lighting. I’m drawn to patient frames. Usually the frame is a middle shot or a wide shot. And there’s inserts and close-ups sometimes, but I feel very confident in the way that we stage and we block the scene. I feel confident that the information is gonna exist on screen. When I was a journalist at the New York Times, I didn’t just write everything, I also photographed everything I worked on. In terms of creating a visual language, I feel very, very comfortable framing and creating compositions in film. A lot of times you watch movies that feel over-lit. There’s too much information that we are able to gather. Working with our cinematographer, Michael Fernandez, we trust the audience so much, almost too much. If something feels a bit darker, if something is not lit in a way that feels a little too highly produced, I trust that someone will still be able to recognize and find the truth and honesty in every frame.

JP: So much so that L.A. begins to feel like its own character. Was there a certain story — one that hasn’t been told about the city — that you wanted to illuminate?

WTH: So many of us grew up watching ’90s L.A. movies: “South Central,” “Menace II Society,” “Friday.” All the Chicano gangster movies, “Blood In Blood Out.” There was also “Heat.” There’s so many movies about Los Angeles in the ’90s that really got L.A. in a way that most modern day movies about Los Angeles don’t. Something happened along the way where people who weren’t from L.A. started to make movies about Los Angeles. It felt a bit tropey often. It created a checklist. “Oh, it needs a lowrider. It needs a palm tree. It needs perfect orange, cotton candy lighting.” It feels kinda corny, if I’m being honest. For a lot of us, I don’t have to tell you that this movie is set in L.A. You feel it, you hear it.

JP: Yes, you hear it. I appreciated how the sonic texture — whether it was a Nate Dogg track or radio spots from Power 106 — helped ground the viewer not only in what they were witnessing, but why.

WTH: Sonically, I’m having a conversation in this movie about how this once-primarily Black community set in Nickerson Gardens in Watts was once over 90% Black, today is over 80% Latino. Which is a real conversation about change, about how Black people have been getting pushed out for generations, but also a complex story about immigration. It’s not always violence, there’s also peace and all this other stuff. The way I explore that is through sound and music. If you notice, this family, the Harris family, they hear a lot of Spanish-language music coming from a neighbor’s home, coming from the outside. There’s a version of that that feels more soapboxy, where I’m telling somebody in dialogue or in the scene that this community was once Black and it’s almost no longer Black. For me, it just felt more interesting to hear that. We’re hearing a Mexican ice cream truck and all these other things. That’s also telling us that this family is experiencing demographic change.

JP: If we can, I want to talk about the state of Hollywood —

WTH: It was so hard to get this movie made, man. It was a challenge. If I’m being incredibly honest with you, I think there was a run beginning in 2020 or so, where a lot of people felt the urge and maybe pressure to support movies made by women and people of color.

JP: Without question.

WTH: And people were supported in ways that were incredible. But for one reason or another, some of those movies didn’t do too well. They didn’t make the money back, which we can sit here and debate about why that happened. I tried to make this movie at the tail end of that run of support. Everyone in Hollywood loved the script. Everyone in Hollywood loved me. Everyone said, “Hey man, we love this. And we love you so much. But we supported something similar a year or two ago and we’re not doing that anymore.” I heard that so much, and from people that would surprise you. Then, in 2023, I got involved in the Sundance Catalyst program. The program invites financiers to finance eight independent movies. [“If I Go”] really took a lot of support and a lot of effort from people who believed in me and believed in the script. It was an interesting time to make an independent movie about a Black family from Los Angeles.

JP: Does the reality of industry have any bearing on the art you want to create versus the art it’s ready for?

WTH: The art that I want to make looks at humans making sense of their lives and the world in a way that maybe we haven’t seen before. There’s a lot of lyricism. There’s all sorts of things. I don’t know if I’m necessarily thinking about the movie industry when I make the art that I make. People don’t know what they want until they see it, until they feel it. I always say this: Sometimes you make something that exists in time and sometimes you make things that are of time. When people are making things that are of time, it’s responding to the zeitgeist or weird ideas around marketing and what’s popular.

JP: What’s trending on TikTok.

WTH: Exactly. It feels so reactionary. That’s of time. I like to think about making things that are in time. In time, for me, is making art that is in conversation with this beautiful legacy of artistry and of filmmaking. It’s making things without thinking about the moment. It’s thinking about truth in character, truth in dialogue, truth in scene, truth in composition, truth in sound. That’s what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about honesty. When it comes to my art, I always want to be in time.

Jason Parham is a senior writer at Wired and a documentary producer. He is a frequent contributor to Image.

(Michael “Cambio” Fernandez)

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