If I Go Will They Miss Me: A father comes home from prison. His son learns to hope again.

Walter Thompson-Hernández's film follows Lil Ant, twelve, as his father returns from prison in Watts. The boy has learned to measure love in small amounts, in ways that won't disappoint him. His father arrives as both present and absent, still struggling with what brought him inside. Thompson-Hernández doesn't push toward easy reconciliation. The film happens in the spaces between them—uncertain and real.

Bodhi Jordan Dell moves through this film quietly. There's something careful in how he watches adults, how his eyes calculate risk. J. Alphonse Nicholson plays the father as a man working against his own weight. The chemistry between them feels lived-in. Danielle Brooks grounds the mother role with real complexity.

Cinematographer Michael Fernandez shoots Watts without romance. Light hits a corner store at dusk. Children mark territory on asphalt. The camera watches these details—how they matter, how they accumulate. Malcolm Parson's score knows when to step back. Silence does work here.

What makes this film work is its refusal to soften poverty or incarceration while also refusing to look away. Thompson-Hernández finds poetry in the real—not magical realism but something more grounded. A conversation on a stoop carries weight. A shared meal is long and full of what can't be said.

The film asks what we owe each other. Not the question but the living of it—one day, then another. There's no resolution. Real life doesn't work that way. Instead, the film offers something smaller: showing up, even imperfectly, might be enough. It has to be.

A film about American fracture that doesn't pretend to fix it. Thompson-Hernández honors the lives of people made invisible by circumstance. He understands that the deepest stories don't come from triumph but from stubborn insistence on connection.