‘Daughters’ Review: Sundance Award Winning Doc Explores Incarceration and Family

When we first meet Aubrey, she’s five years old; the purple beads in her braids glow in the light from her fish tank as she brags about her math skills. She claims to have learned her multiplication tables from her cousin, but in truth she’s developed her impressive number sense through day-to-day life. “He’s coming home in seven more years,” she says of her father, Keith, one of several incarcerated men featured in Daughters, the multiple Sundance Award-winning documentary, currently streaming on Netflix and playing in select theaters. 

Ostensibly focused on a dance held in June of 2019 for several fathers incarcerated in the Washington D.C. prison system and their daughters, the film—which takes place over the course of five years—is fundamentally about time and how its passage compounds and metastasizes both personal loss and systemic injustice.

Over the course of the film, we watch Aubrey transform from confident, open-hearted hopefulness to reticent and fearful resignation. It’s one of the most emotionally resonant and difficult to confront transformations in any film so far this year. 

When we meet Santana at the age of 10, time seems to have already taken a considerable toll. With her father Mark in prison for the foreseeable future, she is forced to play the part of parent to her younger siblings, the stress and exhaustion of which has given her a world-weary visage of a woman three times her age. 

Ja’Ana, whom we meet at her 11th birthday party, wonders about the value of maintaining a relationship with her father Frank. He is a man she rarely if ever gets to see—the men’s families are charged prohibitively high rates by independent contractors for video visits—and never is allowed to touch. The D.C. prison system is one of hundreds across the country that ceased to offer in-person or “touch” visits a decade earlier.

The power of touch—hugging, play fighting, silly dancing—is as central to the conceit of the film as time is. 

Angela Patton, an activist who founded the Richmond, Virginia-based non-profit Girls for a Change and who both co-directed Daughters with the Los Angeles-based filmmaker Natalie Rae and also appears in the film, devised the Date with Dad dance with the idea that personal contact is one of the most crucial aspects of rehabilitation—regardless of which side of the bars you are on. Deprived of their parents’ touch, Patton says, children “doubt their ability to survive in the world.”

Patton and Rae are more interested in the palpable than the contextual. We never learn what led the men to become incarcerated; statistics showing the devastation the carceral state has wrought on Black communities are not shared. Instead, we get the texture of a donated suit, the tears on a broad shoulder as the dance ends, the whir of an electric shaver as a trepidatious dad heads out on parole, and the rainwater on a windshield following a rare jailhouse visit by one of the daughters.  For a film about one of the most pressing issues of our time, it can strangely feel spun out of gossamer.

More than anything, Daughters—along with Greg Kwedar’s remarkable current release Sing Sing—speaks to the absolute societal and spiritual imperative of investing in rehabilitation, within prisons and outside their walls. Both films show that every day that our so-called justice system is predicated on warehousing bodies and not engaging with and inspiring souls, we are only laying to waste a society we are supposedly seeking to protect.