“Daughters” documentary about four girls with incarcerated fathers is out now on Netflix

The new Daughters documentary is available now on Netflix:

“In a correctional facility in Washington DC, a group of fathers are dressed in smart suits. They shuffle on the plastic chairs, fussing with their ties and craning their necks in anticipation. Eventually, a door swings open, and a parade of young girls in prom dresses begin to make their way down the hallway. For one day only, their incarcerated fathers have been permitted to change out of their jumpsuits.

Watch the official Daughters trailer:

“‘It gets you when they walk down the hallway,’ says Angela Patton, the co-director of Daughters, a striking new documentary that follows four daughters and their incarcerated fathers as they prepare for a daddy-daughter dance. It got me, too, seeing the girls walk down that jail corridor, eyes searching frantically for their dads. Some of them hadn’t hugged their fathers in years.

“Patton is a community activist from Richmond, Virginia, who has organised 13 of these dances since 2008. But no matter how many of them she attends, she says it’s always emotional. Each time, Patton says, ‘I have to excuse myself and go to the ladies’ room and get myself together.’

“The documentary premiered at the Sundance film festival earlier this year, where it won two audience awards, for best documentary and overall festival favourite. Sensing its power, Netflix scooped it up just a few days later.

For Patton, the story belonged to the daughters, whose idea it was to bring the dance into the jail …

“After giving a Ted Talk about the dances back in 2012, Patton was approached by several people who wanted to make a film about the outreach programme she had founded. All of them were men. ‘I could tell their willingness to work with me was all about ‘I need access to the prison’,’ she says. They wanted to focus on the fathers, and to learn why they were inside. But for Patton, the story belonged to the daughters, whose idea it was to bring the dance into the jail, and who wrote a letter to the then Richmond city sheriff that helped make the first dance happen. Our society, says Patton, likes to tell children what to do. ‘Children don’t really have a say,’ she adds. It was Patton who hand-delivered the letter. ‘I always say: I’m not going to be a dream crusher.’

“Natalie Rae, who co-directed the film, had been sent Patton’s Ted Talk by a friend. ‘I had goosebumps, I was crying, and my heart was pounding,’ she remembers. She was struck by the way Patton listened to young people, ‘like they’re equals.’

“They made the documentary over an eight-year period, though it wasn’t until 2019 that they found their protagonists. There is Aubrey, an irrepressibly bubbly five-year-old who is ‘the smartest one in class’; 10-year-old Santana, whose dad’s absence fills her with righteous fury; 11-year-old Ja’Ana, who is eager to see her father but doesn’t remember him because her mother had refused to let her visit him behind bars; and 15-year-old Raziah, a high-school student struggling with her mental health. …

“‘It’s really important that people aren’t seeing this as a prison rehabilitation film,’ says Rae. ‘It’s about the bravery that these girls had to find forgiveness.’ But like the Oscar-nominated Time (2020), about a mother raising a family while her husband is inside, The Work (2017), which follows a group therapy session in a high-security men’s prison, and 13th (2016), Ava DuVernay’s take on the prison industrial complex, Daughters makes an impassioned case for more humane treatment of those serving time, and more consideration for their families.”

Read the full story at TheGuardian.com.