Paris- and Berlin-based company Saloud Morissette has acquired international rights to Walter Thompson-Hernandez’s first feature, If I Go Will They Miss Me, ahead of its world premiere as part of the Next section of the Sundance Film Festival. UTA Independent Film Group is handling U.S. rights.
The film is based on Thompson-Hernandez’s short film, which won the Short Film Jury Prize in the U.S. Fiction category at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, and was produced by Josh Peters, Saba Zelehi and Ben Stillman.
Combining social realism and magic realism, the film follows 12-year-old Lil Ant as he struggles to form a relationship with his father. He soon begins to have surreal, almost ghostly hallucinations of the boys floating through the neighborhood, revealing a father-son connection and exposing the threads that bind family, heritage, and place.
“We were immediately drawn to Walter Thompson-Hernandez’s unique voice,” said François Morissette, Founder and Managing Director of Salard Morissette. “It explores the complexities of family ties with both emotion and deep authenticity, while highlighting the power of dreams and imagination to propel us forward. We are proud to support Walter’s vision and accompany the filmmaker in his intimate and quietly powerful work.”
Thompson Hernandez is a writer and director born and raised in Southeast Los Angeles and a Sundance Lab alumnus. He began his career at The New York Times, where he worked as a global subculture reporter from 2018 to 2021. During that time, he wrote his book, The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Heartland, which is currently being adapted into an adaptation by Searchlight Pictures.
In 2021, he was selected as one of Variety magazine’s “10 Storytellers to Watch”. In 2022, he was recognized by Filmmaker Magazine as one of the “25 Newcomers in Film.”
He won the U.S. Short Film Jury Prize for Fiction at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival for “If I Go Will They Miss Me.”
In 2025, he directed the feature-length documentary “Shooting Guards” for Netflix and debuted his first narrative feature “Pipas (Kites)” at Tribeca, where he won the Special Jury Award for Bold Storytelling. He was recently selected as one of Variety Magazine’s “10 Directors to Watch”.
