“There Were No Easy Answers to My Questions”: Iliana Sosa on Her SXSW-Debuting Doc What We Leave Behind

Iiana Sosa’s What We Leave Behind is an astonishingly intimate labor of love. The film emerged from Sosa’s desire to document her grandfather Julián, a proudly hardworking man who first left his native Mexico back in the early 1940s to join the US government’s Bracero program, which brought in farm workers to remedy the WWII labor shortage. After his daughters, including the filmmaker’s mom, moved permanently to the States, the widowed Julián spent the next two decades traveling solo from Durango to visit them in the southwest. But as he now nears his nonagenarian years the monthly bus trip becomes too much. So the El Paso-raised Sosa decides to accompany Julián back to his rural land and follow her grandfather’s journey to the inevitable end. Filmmaker caught up with the first-generation American director — and 2020 “25 New Face of Independent Film” — to learn all about her own journey, including how a simple family portrait became an unexpected love letter. And how, as she puts it, “filmmaking pulled me closer to him, across the border and into his home.” What We Leave Behind makes its SXSW debut March 11.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.