Reel Rundown: Sundance Film Festival audience favorite ‘Daughters’ speak on importance of dad-daughter relationship
Even under the best of circumstances, being a parent isn’t always easy. Being a good father can be, in some cases, particularly hard.
Imagine what it must be like to be a father who is separated from his children, because he’s serving time in prison. Seeing someone on a computer screen or through a glass window is hardly conducive to any kind of real intimacy.
That, though, is the situation facing the men featured in the documentary film “Daughters,” which is streaming on Netflix. All are candidates for a program called a Date With Dad.
Founded in 2007 by Angela Patton, the Richmond, Virginia-based social activist who co-directed the documentary with Natalie Rae, the program was intended to foster the connection between fathers and daughters living in and around Patton’s community. What she soon realized, though, was that many young girls couldn’t participate because their dads were in prison.
Patton approached the Richmond City Jail with the idea of holding a dance inside the facility. And the jail officials liked the idea. Patton’s idea was such a success that other cities, such as Omaha and Miami, began holding their own variations. The documentary “Daughters” follows the program as it plays out in a Washington, D.C., prison.
Rae and Patton spend time both with the incarcerated men, whom we gradually come to know as individuals. Meanwhile, the filmmakers introduce us to a number of the daughters, whose ages range from 5 to 13. We watch as the men go through a 10-week program that entails both instruction and counseling with the life coach Chad Morris that requires them open up emotionally.
We watch, too, as the girls go through their own emotional stages. Some, like 5-year-old Aubrey Smith, are sweetly innocent and excited, while a number of others – a girl named Santana among them – are moody and wary of the men they hardly know.
When it comes to the dance itself, tears are as much a part of the process as the smiles that come, some grudgingly, to most all as even the most reluctant dancers end up boogying their way around the room.
Rae and Patton don’t end their film there, though. They revisit some of the documentary’s principals first a year and then three years later. Some men swear that, once free, they’ll never again go to prison. And while some of the daughters, like Santana, seem to lighten up, others – like an older Aubrey – seem to be shutting down, aware that it may be years before they’ll ever have the same kind of contact with their father.
It should come as no surprise that “Daughters” won two audience awards at January’s Sundance Film Festival – Audience Favorite and U.S. documentary. Even more important than awards, though, is the point the film makes.
Daughters need their dads as much, or even more, as their dads need them. And to a man, the dads featured in Rae and Patton’s documentary need their daughters as much as they do life itself.