Year: 2024

Runtime: 107 minutes

Directed by: Natalie Rae and Angela Patton

By Sarah Manvel 

One of “Daughters”’ co-directors, Angela Patton, is the founder of a charity, Girls For A Change, working with young black women in Virginia and Washington DC. As part of that program, they ran an annual father-daughter dance for incarcerated men and their daughters in a Richmond jail. In 2019 the “Date with Dad” program was expanded into Washington DC, and Ms Patton and her co-director Natalie Rae had cameras in place to document the occasion. The event is especially important because in the last decade most jails and prisons have ended in-person, or so-called touch, visits; only expensive video calls are offered in place, or expensive phone calls done via for-profit apps. So this dance is the only chance these children will have for direct physical contact with their fathers for years, maybe even decades. It’s therefore impossible to understate its importance, and “Daughters” won the Festival Favorite and the US Documentary Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival because it absolutely captured the momentousness of the day. 

The focus is on four pairs of dads and daughters: fifteen-year-old Raziah, who misses her father Alonzo so much she’s attempted suicide; ten-year-old Santana, whose parents were in their early teens when they had her and who resents her father Mark’s absence enormously; 11-year-old Ja’Ana, whose father Frank has been incarcerated so long she no longer remembers him; and five-year-old Aubrey, a sparky and clever child who’s counting down the years already until her encouraging father Keith will come home. In the ten weeks in the run-up to the dance the fathers must complete a counselling course in order to be allowed to attend. It’s run by a calm man named Chad, who says he has no qualifications other than being a father himself. But what Chad is remarkably good at is getting these men to focus on what their time in prison means to their children instead of what it means to themselves. In the counselling sessions the men –  all of whom are black, and none of whose crimes are revealed – start to reflect on how their own childhoods shaped the men they have become, and get them to pondering how they want things to work out for their girls. These are not articulate men, so to hear them open up even a little about their feelings or ambitions is a small victory each time. 

The girls and their mothers are also interviewed, separately, and sometimes filmed together in their daily lives, where a lot of milestone events like birthday parties happen in parking lots. It’s clear that all of the mothers have done the work of setting aside their own resentments and feelings about their situations to do what is best for their girls. And the four main girls are each led by separate motivations to attend the dance. Ja’Ana is both anxious to meet Frank and anxious about what kind of father she has. Raziah tearily asserts she just loves Alonzo and wants to spend time with him. Santana has big plans to tell Mark just what she thinks of him. And tiny little Aubrey, who is the smartest kid in her class and knows her tens timetables, just wants to give Keith a hug.

On the day itself the cameras were right there to capture how the time together at the chance altered and shaped their relationship in somewhat unexpected ways. The fathers have all been allowed to wear suits, as if it’s a prom, and their proud and anxious faces as they wait for their daughters in their party dresses is remarkably affecting. The dancing itself is of course terrible – the dads are all too sheepish and the girls all too excited, but none of this is the point, of course. They’re just getting to be together. 

After the dance the documentary crew followed up with the families up to three years later, and there’s a tangible difference between the girls whose fathers have left prison and those whose fathers have not. There is no mercy in the American justice system anymore and it’s evident that the innocent children are being punished just as much, if not more, than the adults serving time. This is made most apparent in the distressing final sequence, when the change in a child’s behaviour is as raw and painful as a bleeding wound. And Ms Patton and Ms Rae made the excellent decision to let this awful sequence speak for itself. It’s unusual to see a documentary both be so confident in its own purpose and to succeed so well in making its point.