“Our daddies are our mirrors that we reflect back on when we decide about what type of man we deserve and how they see us the rest of our lives.” The new documentary Daughters opens with these introductory words, spoken by Angela Patton, the film’s co-director (alongside Natalie Rae) and CEO of Girls for a Change, an organization established over a decade ago to help Black girls in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia. One of its programs, “Date with Dad,” began when, after a father-daughter dance was suggested, one girl said her dad couldn’t come because he was in jail. The response from another girl: “Why don’t we just take the dance in the jail?” Since then, “Date with Dad” has expanded into Washington D.C., and Daughters observes the build-up to the dance and four girls preparing to reunite with their incarcerated fathers. It’s a candid, beautiful film about hurting and healing, as well as the power of contact, and one that packs an emotional punch (as suggested when it won two audience awards at Sundance this year).
A project eight years in the making, Daughters is simultaneously telling eight stories. It doesn’t just follow the four girls — all of different ages, experiences, and holding varied feelings toward their fathers — but also the incarcerated men. Aubrey is five years old, with her dad Keith in prison for (hopefully) seven years. She was in the house when her father was arrested, and still doesn’t quite understand this situation. “I wish my dad was home already,” she says early on, the sense of deep longing profoundly evident. Santana, aged 10, was born when her father Mark was in prison and has a more resigned attitude; all she’s ever known is him quickly rebounding back into prison, so she is done shedding tears over him. Ja’Ana, 11, remembers nothing about her father Frank, and her mother doesn’t want Ja’Ana to see him. Finally, there’s 15-year-old Raziah, who deeply misses a dad who has been absent for the major milestones in her life, leading the teen to suicidal thoughts.
Meanwhile, the fathers involved with the dance must attend a 10-week, “responsible fatherhood” course with group therapy sessions. Life coach Chad Morris tells them this process will bear out a roller coaster of emotions: there will be the highs of reuniting with their daughters and spending time with them, but contextualized by the knowledge that it cannot last, not now. But the rarity of this opportunity is probably more notable than most viewers will realize. Most of the prisoners haven’t had this sort of personal connection with their daughters. For Raziah’s father Alonzo, it has been a year since he last touched year; for others, the gap has been even longer. And physical meetings are becoming extremely rare for inmates. As the film makes clear, more and more prisons are ceasing in-person visits and replacing them with phone and video calls that charge expensive fees (it’s no coincidence that video visits have become a billion-dollar industry in the U.S.).
As the American carceral system has nudged into mainstream discourse more conspicuously over the past half decade or so, independent cinema has likewise focused more on prisons, in everything from the recently released Sing Sing to Garret Bradley’s stirring documentary Time. Daughters is about the effect of incarceration on children provoked both by the system and those within it. In one group session, a convict mentions how he told his daughters’ mothers that he wouldn’t be like his father, only to now be drifting in and out of jail. There’s deep regret held by these men, and shared between them. They bear wounds and create new ones in their children. Indeed, at one point DP Michael Cambio Fernandez’s camera focuses on a young child running around in circles, and it’s hard not to read this moment as an apt metaphor for the persisting cycles of generational trauma present in so many of the lives depicted here.
Similar to what Bradley achieved with Time, Patton and Rae strike a balance in Daughters between the political and the personal. Every scene is intimate, with the film being granted access to both the prison-set therapy sessions and the day-to-day lives of Aubrey, Santana, Ja’Ana and Raziah. There’s a focus on close-ups of the four girls throughout, their looks of pensiveness communicating both pain and resilience. Moreover, Fernandez shoots the film partly on grainy 16mm film, including the main dance itself as well as some dreamy interludes that hint at Rae’s music video background. Sometimes, the camera is positioned in dynamic places, like inside a laundromat washing machine. At others, the composition is minimalist and the frame sun-kissed (the prison group meet in a room with a large massive window). And at still other times, the film uses techniques like slow motion to emphasize moments of joy or beauty that push through the noise, such as in a sequence of Sanatana dancing in an empty parking lot.
These aesthetic flourishes add a pronounced emotional texture to Daughters, which is already a complex, delicate and powerful watch. The film never feels insistent or instructive, introducing the main stories to us gradually and letting the human experiences at their center speak for themselves. Patton has said this is not a jail story but a love story, and she and Rae make sure not to wallow in misery but instead to survey the authentic emotional spectrum that comes out of the material. And while the film could have reasonably ended at its spiritual peak — the dance — 20 minutes before its ultimate conclusion, flash-forwards allow the film to locate a bittersweet coda. Yet it’s all but certain that the extended, stirring sequence of the dance itself will be what lingers in viewers’ memories. In this moment, when Kelsey Lu’s soft and tender score kicks in, when all of the nervous waiting and anticipation melts into a father-daughter embrace, Patton and Rae deeply empathetic film invites viewers to feel what these eight people do: that here, at least for a little while, nothing else matters.
DIRECTOR: Angela Patton & Natalie Rae; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; IN THEATERS: August 9; STREAMING: August 14; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 42 min.
