“If I Go Will They Miss Me” Trailer Puts Black Fatherhood and Imagination in Focus
- PowerPage Staff
- 11 minutes ago
- 2 min read
The first full look at “If I Go Will They Miss Me” has arrived, and it refuses the flat language of a conventional family drama. Rich Spirit’s official trailer follows a boy named Lil Ant as he watches his father, Big Ant, move in and out of the family’s life. Airplanes, memory and imagination become part of the child’s attempt to understand absence.
The “If I Go Will They Miss Me” official trailer introduces Bodhi Dell as Lil Ant, J. Alphonse Nicholson as Big Ant and Danielle Brooks as the mother holding the household together. Walter Thompson-Hernández wrote and directed the feature, expanding ideas from his Sundance-recognized short film into a story about fractured fatherhood, longing and the private worlds children build when adults cannot give them complete answers.
Nicholson’s presence gives the film immediate cultural weight for audiences who know him from “P-Valley,” while Brooks brings the emotional authority that has carried her from “Orange Is the New Black” to “The Color Purple.” The trailer does not reduce either parent to a slogan. Big Ant can be magnetic and unreliable at once; the family’s love does not erase the damage caused by his disappearance.
Visually, the film moves between everyday Los Angeles spaces and Lil Ant’s airborne imagination. That contrast keeps the story rooted in a specific Black family while allowing it to feel lyrical rather than clinical. The child’s viewpoint is not a decorative device. It is the structure that lets the film ask how a young person interprets abandonment before he has the language to name it.
Rich Spirit has set a special Los Angeles opening for September 11, followed by a wider release in more than 30 markets on September 18. PowerPage’s recent “Mother Mary” coverage followed a film into streaming; this story begins earlier, with an independent theatrical campaign and a verified distributor trailer. The official video above is the best introduction to the film’s tone and family story.
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