Review: Incarcerated parents and their daughters dance in moving doc ‘Daughters’

A group of incarcerated parents are warned in the documentary “Daughters” that they are about to go on “emotional rollercoasters”. A truer prediction has never been uttered.

In the film, directed by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, parents incarcerated in a Washington, D.C. correctional center are given a rare gift: a few hours to spend with their daughters, who range in age from 5 years old to teenagers. For an afternoon, they can be together to dance, hug and laugh.

For some girls, the show, called Daddy Daughter Dance, will be the first time they touch their dad. Others haven’t seen their father in years. The trend in US prisons has been toward video calls and away from in-person “touch” visits. Even “in-person” visits are often done via plexiglass and telephone.

The unspoken question that permeates “Daughters,” which premieres Wednesday on Netflix, is: Should it be so rare for incarcerated men to have real human interaction with their children? In this headache of a documentary, the most plaintive appeal is basic. Whatever they are, one of the incarcerated men says, “We’re still parents.”

“Daughters,” awarded at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, first turns his attention to a few girls as they prepare for the afternoon. Aubrey, a chatty and instantly adorable 5-year-old, says, “When he says he loves me, I’ll tell him I love him more.” Aubrey’s father, Keith, will be in prison for another seven years, a period of time that even a 5-year-old as smart as Aubrey simply cannot fathom. She is learning to count.

Others have more complicated feelings before the dance. Santana, 10 years old, swears not to shed a tear when she leaves. “The only reason he’s not here is because he wants to keep doing bad things,” she says. Her father, Mark, didn’t hug his daughter until she was a year old. For 11-year-old Ja’Ana, seeing her father is even rarer. Her mother didn’t want her to see her father behind bars. “I don’t remember anything about my father, absolutely nothing,” she says.

On the day of the dance, the parents, all in suits and with a flower in their buttonholes, are sitting in a long row of chairs when their daughters arrive. The filmmakers capture the moment almost like a fairy tale, with lots of light and little sound other than a few songs, some shouts of “Daddy!” and a slightly muffled cry.

Inside a gym, fathers and daughters play and dance. Some have a ball. For others, it is clear that the gulf between them cannot be bridged in a day. When it’s time for daughters to go home and parents to return to their cells, the separation is inevitably crushing. Before the girls leave, the parents sign pledges to stay alive. In the 12 years of the program, 95% of participating parents do not return to jail.

We were fortunate to have two extremely sensitive films released this summer about the lives of incarcerated people and the paths they can take to redemption in “Daughters” and the recently released drama inspired by real stories “Sing Sing”. In “Filhas”, the dialogue around dance is also a reason for reflection on the formation of imprisoned men and the cycles of parental absence that can last for generations.

Time is the fundamental metric of prison life, which makes a documentary like “Daughters”, filmed over years, unique, perhaps even monstrously capable of capturing its passage. As much of an emotional rollercoaster as “Daughters” can be, there’s no preparation for the film’s heartbreaking epilogue years later. Aubrey is now 8 years old. She hasn’t seen her father since the dance. When she finally manages to visit her father, she doesn’t recognize him through the plexiglass. On the way home, Aubrey no longer looks like the optimism she had when she was 5 years old. This is a tragedy, in very real time.

“Daughters,” a Netflix release, is rated PG-13 for some thematic elements and language. Running time: 107 minutes. Three stars out of four.