Prison stands between fathers and their Daughters in poignant, lovely documentary

Directed by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, Daughters is a moving nonfiction portrait of resilience, potential forgiveness, and the capacity for growth. In telling a dual-track familial story—one part highlighting the arbitrary cruelty of life, foisted upon children too soon, the other part shining a light on possible redemption—the film opens up an audience to deep reservoirs of feeling. The result is something both heartbreaking and beautiful, instructive and enlightening.

Daughters premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the U.S. Documentary Audience Award in advance of being acquired by Netflix. Unfolding over nearly six years, the movie follows four Washington, D.C. girls (Aubrey, Santana, Ja’Ana, and Raziah) as they prepare for a momentous “daddy-daughter dance” with their incarcerated fathers.

Born of a decade-old program whose roots stretch back to Patton’s Camp Diva Leadership Academy, the “Date with Dad” event requires that inmates commit to a 10-week counseling program—the time period most of the film covers. As the men learn some life skills and navigate uncertainty getting ready for the dance, their daughters similarly manifest a range of emotions as they prepare to reconnect with fathers that they haven’t seen, in some cases, in almost two years. The dance itself comprises a roughly 25-minute portion of the film, while the final 20-plus minutes flash forward one year later, and then another three years.

With its delicate music, interview-clip voiceover from an unseen Patton, and matted black-and-white opening, Daughters immediately establishes a cultural rootedness and lived-in authenticity that announces itself as separate and distinct from the “talking-head expert” construction that informs many documentaries. This is inside-out filmmaking, not the other way around.

In addition to benefiting enormously from its subjects, and the fact that the girls range in age from a very precocious five years old to an appropriately guarded 15, Daughters succeeds by taking a specific situation and ably locating the universal. Some of its emotional appeal is agonizingly direct, as when 10-year-old Santana claims she won’t shed a tear the next time her father goes to prison (“It’s not okay, it’s affecting me!”), and says that she won’t have a kid herself, “even for one million dollars.” Later, teenager Raziah’s mom Sherita tearfully worries about her daughter’s depression and suicidal thoughts. While the circumstances from which these intense feelings are born are dire, the adolescent anger, frustration, and estrangement they represent is something to which everyone can relate.

Is the movie at all political? In the conventional sense, no. It provides details about the program at its center without necessarily expanding itself into a broader cinematic treatise of advocacy for its large-scale adoption. If anything, Daughters could actually stand to expand upon the very odd, almost entirely unaddressed fact that one of its co-directors is the creator of the program it is assaying. There’s no nefarious intent here, certainly, but this curious framing is a misstep.

That said, Daughters is incredibly smart about finding and including relatable human moments that meaningfully add up, and pull a thoughtful viewer onto a plane of elevated reflection. There are one or two bits of slight speechifying (in group session, an inmate reflects on prison not being normal), but most such moments have a simple moral clarity. These include some eye-opening revelations about in-person visits, and a loved one on the outside explaining how to load money and use the special app that covers pay-as-you-go virtual visits.

At a time when social media overload has seemingly contributed to collective brain rot, and basic expressions of sympathy and grace are routinely attacked in pejorative (if often incoherent) fashion as “socialism” or “communism,” Rae and Patton’s movie sturdily plants an emotional flag, and asks viewers to simply consider the actual lives of its subjects.

This uncomplicated narrative structure and Daughters’ existence at the intersection of race, criminal justice, social reform, and mental health issues make the film, in its own way, a modern-day political document. It opens one’s eyes, without preaching, to the accumulated injustices visited upon those already being punished, and how those stacked decks can further feed terrible downstream consequences.

The movie is additionally elevated by the artfulness of its telling. The obvious comparative bookend is Garrett Bradley’s Oscar-nominated Time, which also traded in elegiac brushstrokes, and unpacked the impact of years of incarceration on both the formally sentenced and their family. Both movies make superlative use of domestic footage to impart the particular trauma (not worse, but unique) of a father imprisoned rather than deceased or otherwise absent—an existence in which a child, in yo-yo-like fashion, must continually reabsorb and contend with the difficult realities of stolen moments and memories.

Kelsey Lu’s score adds a sheen of ever-present poignance, and interesting editing choices by Troy Lewis and Adelina Bichis also abound. The movie doesn’t front-load its subjects (in fact, it doesn’t introduce one until 35 minutes into the film), and despite its inside/outside dichotomy, its overarching rhythm is anything but programmatic. Cinematographer Michael Cambio Fernandez is smart enough to let his camera linger, capturing moments of swallowed pain or silent anticipation. After the dance’s conclusion, quiet shots of a pile of belts and dress shoes piercingly communicate the end of a reverie for its fathers.

The movie’s visual scheme is not back-foot collage work, though. Rae and Patton also work proactively to give their youngest subjects agency and translate their roiling inner landscapes. In one evocative sequence, Santana describes a dream over footage of her outside at night, the darkness giving way to a shot of lightning, then rain rolling down a car window.

Daughters connects so well because it isn’t just invested in the uplift and tears of its main story. It reaches both over and past this sweetly staged reunion, into the more bittersweet. The men are not just learning how to tie a necktie, they’re being taught vulnerability. The girls, meanwhile, are granted a multi-dimensionality rarely even seen in narrative films; they’re hurting but desirous of connection, hopeful but still skeptical. While postscripts provide updates for viewers, they don’t sand down one fact that can’t be stressed enough: life is tough and our time is not guaranteed, so do what you can to stay present in the lives of those you love. 

Director: Natalie Rae, Angela Patton
Release Date: August 14, 2024 (Netflix)