Portland Return

IN APRIL, PORTLAND-BASED Panorama Film Festival presented If I Go Will They Miss Me, a feature film written and directed by Walter Thompson-Hernández ’09. A critical mass of UP students, faculty, staff, and alums filled the Cinema 21 theater in support of Walter and in anticipation of the film’s Oregon premiere.

If I Go Will They Miss Me had only had its world premiere a few months prior at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, where the film received very strong reviews and a deal for nationwide distribution. The Panorama Film Festival jury gave the movie the prize for Best Narrative.

The film walks closely with a Los Angeles family following a father’s return from a prison sentence. The 12-year-old son, L’il Ant, is learning about Greek mythology in school. He has an active imagination, loves to draw and sketch, and he sees his father, Big Ant, as a god-like figure returning from a hero’s journey. Big Ant struggles under this opinion and with his son’s artistic nature, particularly when he sees a sketch of the “plane people,” rows of young boys in white T-shirts, standing with arms out wide like they’re preparing to fly. Big Ant had seen the same vision when he was a boy. Thompson-Hernández described the image as a kind of vision that appears to boys in their neighborhood when they are about to “fly into adulthood too soon.”

In a Q&A after the film, Thompson-Hernández also said he wanted the film to ask the question: “Who is worthy of redemption?”

Thompson-Hernández is a former New York Times reporter and won a Whiting Award for his first book The Compton Cowboys. In 2018, he wrote the essay “From Compton to Samana” for this magazine, and it’s now taught in UP’s core curriculum classes. He evolved his storytelling from journalism to audio memoir, with an NPR podcast called California Love, and then turned to filmmaking. He directed a Netflix documentary Shooting Guards, and he also wrote and directed the film Kites, which takes place in Brazil. His memoir Crazy Boys will be out next year. His latest evolution? Teaching. He came back to The Bluff to teach a storytelling class this spring. He says he wanted to teach the class he always wanted to take.

Look for If I Go Will They Miss Me in theaters later this year.