“Daughters,” an eight-year passion project from directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae, garnered massive industry attention when it won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at Sundance earlier this year—and now that attention has spread to the general public with its release earlier this month on Netflix.
A heartbreaking documentary on a profoundly important subject, “Daughters” follows four African-American families, divided by the American penal system, that participate in Washington, D.C.’s first Date With Dad program, a Virginia-born initiative that allows incarcerated fathers to enjoy a prom-like dance with their daughters for one impactful night. The directors’ cameras offer intimate and unfiltered access not only to the daughters, ages 5 to 15, as they ready themselves for the experience, but to the inmates’ 10-week counseling sessions leading up to the “date”; the dance itself, with its joyous and painful emotional rollercoasters; and the months and years following the event, to track the changes it inspired in both the fathers and their girls.
Structurally, “Daughters” takes a familiar and commercially agreeable tack. The formula of shadowing four or five individuals/relationships and intertwining their stories into a larger narrative is the language of celebrated documentaries from the early aughts onward. “Spellbound” and “20 Feet From Stardom” come to mind, not to mention countless docuseries that have followed suit. There’s a reason this approach is used so often: It’s because it works, and by the end of “Daughters,” we feel connected to these troubled men and their troubled offspring; their story is the story is hundreds of thousands of Black fathers languishing in American prisons.
The daughters of the title range in age from 5-year-old Aubrey to 15-year-old Raziah, girls chosen not simply for camera-readiness but for the wide chasm of their circumstances and their understanding, from a kind of shattering naivety about the tenure of the fathers’ sentences to an engrained cynicism about the separation. The situations force some daughters to grow up quickly. “Never in my life will I be a mother,” 10-year-old Santana says to the camera, a quote I won’t soon forget.
For the fathers, the circumstances are just as heterodox; for some, the Date with Dad is not a happy reunion but an awkward first contact with a daughter who has literally never felt her father’s touch. We watch them prepare not only emotionally but sartorially. Each is tailored for a suit for the occasion, and given a haircut; some need to learn how to tie a tie. The importance of these things most us in the free world take for granted cannot be overstated. We have a tendency to otherize the men and women in our prisons, but actions like these restore their dignity, if only for a night. Significantly, we never learn the circumstances of their convictions, for there is little room for judgment or moralizing in Patton and Rae’s vision for the film. Compassion is their currency: No matter the mistakes they made, everyone is human; everyone has value; everyone can change.
The scene viewers will remember most, I reckon, is that of the fathers, dressed to impress, waiting in a prison hallway for their daughters to appear, their necks craned expectantly, all of them soon to be overwhelmed with the simple act of a paternal hug. As the film reminds us, hundreds of prisons, including the one documented in “Daughters,” have outlawed in-person visits since 2014, only permitting video calls, with the inmates picking up the tab for them—a glaring example of our indecently capitalistic prison system.
“Daughters” is a paean, then, to the transformational, even healing, power of physical touch. For some of the fathers, the Date with Dad reinforces bonds that had frayed by time and guilt and resentment. For others, it creates new bonds, or at least lays the groundwork for their creation. And as “Daughters” reminds us in an endnote, 95% of Date with Dads fathers do not return to prison once they’re out.
This is the best kind of advocacy film, one that lets its indelible images, its profound dialogue, even its mournful musical score, incite change, without a need for boldfaced sermonizing. Needless to say, it should be screened in every prison and every classroom. We need to reconsider the implications of draconian punishment in this country. “Daughters” isn’t the end of the conversation; it’s the start of it.
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