One of the most satisfying things you can see at Sundance Film Festival is a writer-director making their way through he short-film-to-feature pipeline. This phenomenon can be seen all the time, whether through historical examples like “Whiplash” and “The Babadook” or 2026 festival entries like “The Musical” and “Union County.”
This year, one of the festival’s most fascinating debuts, “If I Go Will They Miss Me,” started in much the same way. After winning the 2022 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Jury Award, Walter Thompson-Hernández returned to the fest with a full-length adaptation of his previous work.
“I just really felt that the story needed a bigger home, a bigger platform. The short was kind of a proof of concept for what I thought would be a movie that we’d all make one day. It was just a process, about four years of working on this and writing it and really thinking,” Thompson-Hernández told TheWrap. “That was my first script I ever wrote, too.”
The feature film’s star J. Alphonse Nicholson said it was that short that first caught his eye, which he remembers now as “the mixtape” to what would become “the album.”
“I’ve said this multiple times, and I’ll continue to say it: It was one of the most beautiful pieces of art I’ve ever seen,” Nicholson told TheWrap. “It showcased us in a very unique way that I hadn’t seen before. Once I got the offer, I saw that Danielle Brooks was on there. That’s all I needed for the feature.”
Set in South LA, the film primarily follows the relationship between Big Ant (Nicholson) and his 12-year-old son Lil Ant (Bodhi Dell) after the former returns home from prison. The film moves like music, carrying a lyrical quality as it weaves between family drama and magical realism. Thompson-Hernández noted that a good deal of flexibility was required in the script to make this happen.
“I come from a world of complete improv, almost discovery, and thinking about scripts as a blueprint, something to kind of follow, but also to be able to deviate from with our actors. It was an interesting process,” Thompson-Hernández said. “It’s a movie that asks an audience member to really sit and be patient, to both be a participant and an observer of the world.”
It’s a quality that spoke to co-star Brooks. The Tony, Emmy and Oscar nominee stars in the film as Lozita, Big Ant’s wife and Lil Ant’s mother.
“It felt very collaborative. Like you said, it felt like it was about discovery, and that to me goes back to my roots. I’m a theater girl,” Brooks said. “I get back to the works, the basics, and really making it about the human experience. It’s about people and us understanding one another.”
Brooks noted that she and Nicholson had known each other for 15 years, making this collaborative project all the more special. The pair spoke to the deep relationship they built in “If I Go Will They Miss Me” — a father struggling under the weight of the tools he lacks and a mother trying to keep her children from being the next chain in a generational cycle.
“You give him grace, and you understand there’s some type of chemical imbalance or something that we can’t quite see. Then when we get close to the eyes throughout the rest of the film, you experience what he’s seeing and feeling,” Nicholson said. “It put me in this space as an artist and as a person to want to figure those things out for myself too. Anger management isn’t always the person who punches the holes in the wall, yelling and screaming. It’s like, what triggers do I have?”
“I named my daughter Freeya because I wanted her to have that reminder her whole life of freedom,” Brooks said. “Watching somebody have this struggle internally of having this moment of joy, but that don’t feel right, because we are trapped in these generational curses that our families have built over and over, these layers of not knowing how to deal with our emotions and how to deal with the things that hit us every day, we watch this family, or really Lozita, make a choice to say, ‘I’m stopping this thing right now. I’m gonna stop this generational curse.’”
