What We Leave Behind, a documentary feature that premiered last week at South by Southwest, is arresting from the start. Julián Moreno, 89, reclines languidly on a living room couch, chewing something, his thin face riven with the thick lines left behind by time and labor. He’s come to see family in El Paso, but he’s eager to get home. His granddaughter, the filmmaker, asks him why. “Here, I plunk down on the couch and watch TV all day,” he says, in a rural Mexican Spanish that compresses and blurs. “I wonder what I’m doing here, so I go back.”
On the bus, he sits silently, his cowboy hat gleaming white against a purpling evening sky that fills the windows like a painting. The granddaughter begins to explain. “Abuelito was a mystery to me when I was a kid,” she narrates. Though he visited each month, she never fully understood him. The film will change that. “This was his land,” she says, as the scene transitions and we find ourselves in Durango.
The granddaughter is Austin-based director Iliana Sosa, and the movie is her feature debut, which she filmed over the course of five years. At first, Sosa conceived of a topical documentary centered on her grandfather’s time in the U.S. Bracero Program, but the project morphed instead into an intensely intimate portrait of his life’s last stages. It’s a well-warranted shift. Moreno, the abuelo, is so compellingly self-contained and the domestic imagery of his life so striking that the film thrives on silence and simple themes: aging and death, family and care, missing those who aren’t around.
