After spending seven years immersed in directing What We Leave Behind, an award-winning documentary about her grandfather’s home in Durango in Mexico, El Paso-born filmmaker Iliana Sosa told herself her next film would not be so personal. She intended to work on something lighter and give herself a break from becoming emotionally involved in a project. But then Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright (Going Clear, The Looming Tower) and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Dazed and Confused) came calling.
Sosa was one of three directors they chose for the HBO documentary trilogy , which was inspired by Wright’s 2018 book about the wild, wonderful, always complex, sometimes heartbreaking Lone Star State. The trilogy premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in