Monday, May 9, 2022

Lo que dejamos atrás (What We Leave Behind)

Co-Sponsored by CineFest Latino Boston

  • Trailer

What We Leave Behind Details

  • Year of Production: 2022
  • Length: 71 minutes
  • Color: Color
  • Screening Format: Digital
  • Language: Spanish and English
  • Subtitle(s): English

About the Film

We are honored to be co-presenting this film with CineFest Latino Boston! CineFest Executive Director, Sabrina Avilés will introduce the film and Iliana at the in-person screening.

After a lifetime of bus rides to the US to visit his children, Julián quietly starts building a house in Mexico for his blind son, and perhaps, also for his daughters and many grandchildren.

At the age of 89, Julián takes one last bus ride to El Paso, Texas, to visit his daughters and their children—a lengthy trip he has made without fail every month for decades—he’s been forbidden from taking the bus alone. After returning to rural Mexico, he quietly and proudly starts building a house in the empty lot next to his home. Over seven years, director Iliana Sosa films her grandfather’s work in this patient, present-tense observational film, where her conversations with Julián bring up previously unspoken memories. In the absence of Julián’s physical visits, can this new house bridge the distance between his loved ones?

Sosa’s debut documentary, What We Leave Behind, is a heartfelt consideration of the legacies of farmworkers, mutual caregivers, and transnational families. Without being reduced to these parts, the film hinges upon Julián’s past as a bracero, a seasonal migrant farmworkers program to alleviate labor shortages in the US after WWII; his care for his son, who is blind; and a visual examination of the land and the work that goes into improving it. (AS)

DocYard screenings are available virtually for passholders only this season – you can purchase a pass here.

World Premiere at the 2022 SXSW. Winner of the Louis Black “Lone Star” Award and Fandor New Voices Award at the 2022 SXSW. Official Selection of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and Museum of the Moving Image First Look 2022. 

About the Filmmakers

Iliana Sosa Director

Iliana Sosa is a documentary and narrative fiction filmmaker based in Austin, Texas. A former Bill Gates Millennium Scholar, she was born and raised in El Paso, Texas, by Mexican immigrant parents. Iliana’s documentary short “An Uncertain Future,” co-directed with Chelsea Hernandez and co-produced by Firelight Media and Field of Vision, premiered at the 2018 […] Read More