2024 Sundance Film Festival Movie Review: Daughters

I don’t know if I have ever had an emotional experience in a movie like I did when I saw Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s documentary Daughters. This movie broke me and brought everyone in the theater to tears, some becoming blubbering messes.

Daughters looks at the daughters of incarcerated fathers as they prepare for a special Daddy Daughter Dance held at the prison their fathers are in as part of a new and unique fatherhood program in Washington D.C.

Daughters is a movie about just that, the daughters of these incarcerated men. Patton and Rae allow us to spend a lot of time with Aubrey, Santana, Raziah, and Ja’Ana. We get to learn about their lives without their fathers, and how they feel about their fathers in prison, and we get additional interviews from other family members, most notably the mothers of these girls who are raising them by themselves. Their lives are all different, but they all miss their fathers and want them out of prison and in their lives.

Patton and Rae also introduce us to the incarcerated fathers. They smartly never tell us what they did to be put in jail because depending on the crime, we might lose sympathy or empathy for them if we found out what crime they committed (I put my trust in the filmmakers that they would not have fathers in the film who committed anything heinous). The fathers are portrayed through an empathetic lens with the filmmakers wanting us not to feel bad for them or their situation necessarily, but to see them as human beings instead of criminals. They go through training classes that have them talk about what it means for them to be fathers, about their fathers growing up (most of them grew up with an absent father or had a tough upbringing), and about what it means to see their daughters and not be in their lives.

Daughters builds up to the day of the dance and when that moment comes, make sure you have a tissue box next to you. We’ve seen what the daughters’ lives are without their fathers and we’ve seen fathers’ lives without their daughters and as the dance gets closer, there is an excitement amongst the daughters and the fathers to see each other, as well as an excitement from us as the viewer that we get to see this reunion. The score swells as the girls, dressed in their nicest dresses, sprint towards their fathers and give tear-filled hugs. When this moment happened, tears and sniffles filled the entire theater. The tears of joy stayed strong during the dance, as we see the daughters and fathers bond in pictures, activities, and of course dancing. The tears of joy soon turned into tears of sadness as the dance was over and, once again, the daughters had to go to life without their fathers.

Patton and Rae don’t end the movie with the dance. They show the effect this dance had on the incarcerated fathers and the result was positive. Each of the father subjects wanted to be a better person and wanted to get out of jail so that they could be with their daughters and be the best father and person they could be for their families. Some of them were able to get out of prison shortly after the dance and start to turn their lives around, while others, unfortunately, had to stay in prison, leaving their daughters fatherless even longer. This becomes even more tragic when you learn that prisons have changed their rules about in-person visits and touching during visits, to the point where inmates are talking to their loved ones on a computer screen. Patton and Rae show us the current state of visitation rights in prisons and don’t bash us over the head with a heavy-handed message, but instead make us aware of the circumstances these prisoners face in trying to see their families.

I cannot think of any movie that had such an emotional impact on me in all of my years of coming to Sundance and I cannot think of a movie where it felt like the entire theater was universally crying and this emotional. Daughters is a beautiful, devastating, and important film that should be seen by all.

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