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What We Leave Behind

IDA Sarowitz Project Completion Fund Grantee

  • Iliana Sosa, Director
  • Emma D. Miller, Producer
  • Isidore Bethel, Producer
An elderly man in a white sombrero and blue checked shirt stands in a cemetery and directs his gaze downward. Behind him are graves decorated with flowers and balloons.

About the Project

Synopsis

After a lifetime of bus rides to the US to visit his children, Julián quietly starts building a house in rural Mexico. In filming his work, his granddaughter crafts a personal and poetic love letter to him and his homeland.

Iliana Sosa, Director/Producer/ Cinematographer

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 SXSW Film Festival, where it won a Jury Award for Best Texas Short. She co-produced the
Emmy nominated feature documentary BUILDING THE AMERICAN DREAM (SXSW 2019) and was a field producer for the Emmy-nominated POV documentary series AND SHE COULD BE NEXT. Iliana has been a Firelight Media Impact Producer Fellow, Sundance Institute Development Fellow, Women at Sundance Adobe Fellow, and Berlinale Talents participant. Her work has been supported by JustFilms/Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, Austin Film Society, and WarnerMedia 150, among others, and Iliana has participated in the True/False Catapult Retreat, The Gotham Documentary Lab, the Jacob Burns Film Center Residency, and the Logan Nonfiction Program with WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND, her first documentary feature. WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND had its World Premiere at SXSW 2022, where it won two special jury prizes: the Louis Black "Lone Star" Award and the first-ever Fandor New Voices Award. Iliana was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2020 and one of DOC NYC’s “40 Under 40” in 2021. She holds an MFA in film production and directing from UCLA and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at UT-Austin.

Emma D. Miller, Producer

Emma D. Miller is a documentary filmmaker and creative consultant based in Los Angeles. In her role as development executive for nonfiction at Concordia Studio, she worked on Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning projects that premiered at Sundance, Tribeca, and Telluride, including TIME (Amazon Studios), BOYS STATE (Apple TV+/A24), BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS
(Utopia), HOMEROOM (Hulu), PROCESSION (Netflix), and BITTERBRUSH (Magnolia Pictures). She headed development of new projects for Edgeline Films, served as the casting associate for the first season of Edgeline's acclaimed Showtime series COUPLES THERAPY, and was associate producer of the Oscar-nominated short documentary "Knife Skills," which was acquired by The New Yorker. She was also associate producer of the Sundance award-winning feature documentary UNREST, which was broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens, acquired by Netflix, and shortlisted for an Academy Award. Previously, she was programming manager at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, where she oversaw all submissions to the Oscar-qualifying festival and managed the film selection process. She is currently producing Elizabeth Lo’s second feature documentary.

Isidore Bethel, Editor/Co-Producer

Isidore Bethel is a French-American filmmaker who Filmmaker Magazine included among its "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in 2020. His directorial debut LIAM received the Paris LGBTQ+ Film Festival’s Jury Prize, and his second film, ACTS OF LOVE, premiered at Hot Docs in 2021. His work as editor and producer has screened at Cannes (Official Selection and ACID), IDFA, Full Frame, True/False, Camden, DOC NYC, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Pompidou Center, receiving Mexican Academy Award and European Film Academy nominations as well as a New York Times Critics’ Pick. Support for films he’s edited and produced has come from the Sundance Institute, Tribeca Film Institute, Ford Foundation, and France’s CNC and Mexico’s IMCINE film boards. Credits include Laurent Bécue-Renard’s OF MEN AND WAR (Cannes, POV), Juan Manuel Sepúlveda’s LA BALADA DEL OPPENHEIMER PARK (Mexican Academy Award Nominee), Juan Pablo González’s CABALLERANGO (IDFA), Daniel Hymanson’s SO LATE SO SOON (True/False, Oscilloscope), Toby Bull’s “Some Kind of Intimacy” (Viennale), Merete Mueller’s “Blue Room” (Hot Docs), and Dominique Cabrera’s GRANDIR (ACID Cannes). A graduate of Harvard, the École Normale Supérieure, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Isidore has been an artist-in-residence with the Institut Français, the Logan Nonfiction Program, and the Villa Medici in Rome as well as a guest artist at CalArts, University of Kent, UT Austin, and Yale.