Daughters (2024)

In a rending, shattering documentary, the U.S. prison system misses the beat

A dreaming five-year-old Aubrey, searching the night sky, longing for her absent father

Daughters (2024)

Streaming on Netflix

There’s no pathway to understanding this haunting documentary except to throw yourself into it, let it wash over you, and by the end weep and gnash your teeth at where it leaves you.

That’s not uncommon with some of the most richly imagined stories; but this 100% non-fiction, true-to-life account held and confounded me like a carefully crafted play, with its bright, cleanly delineated segments.

Nothing is made up.  Young Black girls and their incarcerated fathers speak and act with their guards down in real time.

Directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae had to earn the trust of their subjects, who open up about their struggles and distress on camera.  Shot over eight years and a 2024 Sundance Audience Award winner, this movie is the filmmakers’ tribute to fathers and daughters caught up in heart-rending bureaucratic cruelty.

Inmates confined to the Washington D.C. federal rehabilitation center are almost never allowed personal visitations.  Even immediate family can visit only via video, a privilege they or the inmate must pay for.

That iron circumstance encircles the mothers and young daughters we meet, the girls sorely missing their fathers behind bars, their mothers both sad and resentful at being single parents.

Following a successful first effort some 10 years ago in Virginia, the program Girls for a Change (Patton is CEO) again sponsors a one-day event, a longed-for meeting between inmates and daughters called a “Dance for Dads”.

Both sets of invited guests need to get ready.  We first meet whip smart Aubrey, aged five, who has school certificates of achievement lining her room.  This gifted youngster with the eyes and spirit of a seer woke up one morning to find that her father, Keith, had been taken to jail.

Santana is 10, an intensely self-aware dance student who’s already deeply cynical, since her father Mark’s absence has meant she needs to be the “dad” to her mother Diamond’s other two younger children.  She sheds no tears for Mark, denouncing him for making bad decisions.

Eleven-year-old Ja’Ana has seen her father Frank so fleetingly she isn’t sure she'll recognize him at the upcoming dance.

Raziah, 15, is adrift and despairing without her father Alonzo.  She pines over all the “missed memories” in her life she’ll never be able to share with him.  Her mother Sherita recounts the day she found Raziah lingering ominously on a rooftop and stopped the girl from jumping.

Step one: re-learning how to loop and cross a necktie in anticipation of the big event

The 30 or so fathers who applied for the chance to dance with their daughters need to prepare psychologically.  This is the sole opportunity they’ve had for a physical visit in a number of years.  Chad, a former offender, is their Fatherhood Life Coach.

In ten mandatory weekly group therapy sessions, he helps the men express their guilt and denial of self-love.  Both lapses have made them feel unworthy of even seeing their daughters, much less rekindling a closeness they’re not sure even exists any longer.

The honesty in these sessions is touching because the men are both shy and sorrowful, soft spoken and gentle, in weighing what they’ve missed in their daughters’ growing up.

Chad forces them to be realistic.  After they’ve put on the suits and ties, re-met, kissed and danced with their daughters, they’ll return to their cells to figure out how to keep the re-awakened connections alive.

At the dance, unsurprisingly, we’re both moved and not the least bit surprised at the smiles, fierce hugs and helpless tears from fathers and daughters.

Awkward silences are quickly bridged by teasing and meticulously posed photos. The miracle of being reconnected keeps dads and girls floating across the dance floor.

Their eyes shift from being filled with wonder to overflowing with tears.  The scene is joyful to be sure, but sorrowful at the tick tock of a six-hour dance slowly pulling them apart again.

In the months and years afterwards, we hear the men making distant phone calls, sometimes from other prisons across the country, with wavering wi-fi connections and half-understood pledges of love and promises to keep in touch.

We learn that Mark, four years after release, has never been rearrested.  He’s home free, and we see his joyous family surrounding him.   He’s the clear success story.

Frank is making tentative steps toward full employment, while his daughter Ja’Ana remains watchful, waiting for more convincing answers to where he's going with his life.

Other fathers face harsher outcomes, with freedom set at a distance, their family ties clearly imperiled.

Aubrey gets the warm hug she’s waited for from Keith, the father holding on tight

Remarkably, astutely, the documentarians make no judgments of these men.  We never learn their offenses.  The movie obviously means to set their stories against the backdrop of a penal system that’s failing them.

Hundreds of prisons, we learn, now offer no physical visitations whatsoever. As one inmate during the therapy sessions observes, their incarceration is designed to make the men feel that landing where they are is “normal”.

Society never expected anything else of them.  Accepting that conclusion is the most rigid mental leg iron that confines them.  Turning it around in their minds will be the critical test in the years to come.

Meanwhile, the prison system has allowed them a day to dance, without offering any clearer chances at rehabilitation.  Will their daughters – still children after all – ever find ways to fight for them, keep their love intact, while living their own lives on their own terms, fatherless or not?

One thin ray of hope shines through:  95% of inmates who participated in the Dance for Dads program haven’t been reincarcerated.  Doesn’t that slender success at least count for something?  Alas, no one, it seems, can find the other right moves.