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PORTSIDE CULTURE

PRISON STANDS BETWEEN FATHERS AND THEIR DAUGHTERS IN POIGNANT, LOVELY
DOCUMENTARY  
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Brent Simon
August 12, 2024
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_ A compassionate documentary told with elegiac brushstrokes,
Daughters tracks the generational trauma of incarcerated fathers. _

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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
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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_
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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)

* daughters
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* incarceration
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* Prisons
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* Washington DC
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* NETFLIX
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* carceral state
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* generational trauma
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