Ride of Passage.

Watch The Heart-Wrenching Short Film About A Dallas Father's Journey To The Grand Canyon.

Filmmaker Alex Braverman and former Dallas Police detective Kim Sanders first met and became friends a few years back, when they worked together on The First 48, the Dallas-set reality show on A&E that follows area police detectives as they investigate homicides.

And it was through the close relationship the two developed that Braverman learned about the Sanders' own sad history with death — Sanders and his wife Martha had lost two of their three children at young ages to fatal viral diseases — as well as Sanders' battles with the demons that come with such losses. Specifically, Sanders told Braverman that, before his son Skipper died six years ago, he had always planned on taking his son to visit the Grand Canyon.

Just this past April, Sanders decided to make the road trip to Grand Canyon on his own, to honor his son. And he allowed Braverman and his co-director Poppy de Villeneuve to join him and document the journey.

“He was immediately interested when Alex approached him, as they have a strong feeling of trust between them,” de Villeneuve said. “And he opened that feeling to me.”

The resulting, heart-wrenching short film created out of the documentation of that trip, titled Passages, premiered on Pitchfork yesterday, largely because the film serves as the visual for the The National's Bryce Dessner and Kronos Quartet's “Tour Eiffel.” It intimately documents the trip Sanders took, beginning with shots inside his home, as well as stop-motion footage of the journey from Dallas to Arizona.

“Upon hearing 'Tour Eiffel,' we imagined ourselves hurtling at great speeds towards an unknown destination,” the directors said in a statement about the short film. “Inspired by the line within the song from Vincente Huidobro's original text, 'My little boy to climb the Eiffel tower,' we wanted to tell a story of fathers and sons.”

Give the film, about a third of which is set in Dallas, a watch below.