Directors Natalie Rae and Angela Patton's documentary Daughters introduces us to four girls as they prepare to reconnect with their incarcerated fathers at the Daddy Daughter Dance.
Daughters is an achingly beautiful exploration of the transformative power of family connection. The film follows four Black American girls — Aubrey, Santana, Raziah, and Ja’Ana — and their incarcerated fathers as they embark on a journey to reunite at a father-daughter dance inside of a Washington D.C. jail. What happens along the path to this reunification will alter their lives forever.
The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024, is co-directed by newcomers Angela Patton and Natalie Rae. Patton started organizing Date with Dad dances in 2008, as part of a program with her organization, Girls For A Change. After Rae watched Patton’s TED talk on the subject, the two met and forged ahead, creating a documentary that highlights the impact of America’s criminal justice system on Black girls.
The documentary is as much a bracing portrait of families impacted by incarceration as it is a love story about communion. Patton and Rae opted to depart from typical sterile depictions of prisons, instead favoring natural light in their cinematic approach. There are even interludes of the daughters in nature, lending an almost magical realist quality to the filmmaking. “We’re so inundated with imagery of bars and clashing metal, and that’s not what this story is about,” Rae shares. “It’s about the beauty and the heart of these families’ connections.” The documentary has resonated with film festival audiences across the country, collecting the Sundance Audience and Festival Favorite awards, in addition to audience and achievement awards at the Full Frame Festival and Miami Film Festival, respectively.
In a sense, Daughters is a tool to raise awareness around basic human rights. Jails and prisons across the country have begun to eliminate in-person visits known as touch visits between incarcerated people and family members. Jail and prison officials cite both security (the search process for entering a prison can be laborious) and the ease that video visits bring to facilities as their main reasons for forgoing touch visits. But these changes have been harmful for those impacted. “Touch is the primary way children feel love,” says Rae. It is human touch that allows these girls and their fathers — whose lives are indelibly stained by trauma — to begin to heal.
An edited version of the conversation follows.
Keith Sweptson
Collier Meyerson: How did the Daddy Daughter Dance come to be?
Angela Patton: To tell you about the dance, let me take you back to the beginning. When I started working in the nonprofit sector, in youth development, I did not see girls being seen and heard a lot of the time — they’d be sidelined or a second thought. So, I decided to use my vacation time and start a program just for girls in my community.
It started as a summer program and now, 20 years later, I have my own building that houses a full-fledged after-school program centered around girls from elementary school to senior year of high school. One of our programs gives girls the tools to create social change. We created a platform for them to be able to talk to our politicians and their school principals. And people started to really take notice. The Date with Dad program grew out of this program.
Some of the girls were starting to put together a dance for the community, but one of our girls shared that she wanted to be with her dad too, even though he was incarcerated. So they thought outside of the box: The girls decided that they wanted to do a dance in the jail because they didn’t feel like it was fair that other girls didn’t get to have the same experience as them.
Where did the idea for a documentary come from?
Natalie Rae: A friend shared Angela’s TED talk on the origin of the Date with Dad dance, and it captured me. I had been feeling like a lot of the conversation around women’s empowerment was patronizing, and Angela’s was such a different, fresh take. She encouraged the ideas to come from young women, not the other way around. The intuition and wisdom that young girls have is so beautiful.
On a more personal level, I think looking at the father-daughter relationship as a mirror to oneself, and as a way to think about who we might attract to us for the rest of our lives, is incredibly powerful and relatable for anyone. So I was really happy when Angela said yes to making a documentary from the perspective of young girls, and I’m so grateful she has been willing to have me tell the story with her.
Keith Sweptson and Aubrey Smith
I’m hoping that the film can be used as a tool for awareness, changing policy, and even changing your own mindset on how you live and forgive.
Angela Patton
How did you gain access to the jail and decide which girls and dads to feature?
AP: The access comes from relationships and trust. When the jail in Washington D.C. reached out to me, I had already done a few of these dances and had something of a blueprint for how they worked. When I was doing the program in Virginia, the sheriff invited other wardens and sheriffs to see how it worked and word just spread.
NR: We got to know all of the fathers, and then from there it was going and starting to meet the moms and the daughters. Not everyone was as comfortable or wanted to be part of it, so that naturally narrowed it down. So then the four girls and dads we ended up with were a range of ages and stories and circumstances, with different relationships to their fathers. It worked out quite organically.
There are countless moments in the film where we see such unbridled vulnerability from the fathers and daughters. How did you create the circumstances for that to happen?
AP: I’ve worked with Chad [Morris] — the facilitator for the Fatherhood Responsibility Program in the film — for many years. He’s a father of two girls, understands the bigger picture, and is an active listener. He has a lot of patience and grace, and he’s always a willing participant. I think that it was really easy for the fathers to ignore the cameras because they’re so tuned in to how he facilitates his circle.
NR: When our cinematographer, Michael Cambio Fernandez, was growing up, he had a parent and family members who were incarcerated. He really knew what it was like to be a kid and go through security and deal with different types of visitations. So honestly, Cambio and Chad would go in that room and just sit down and chat with the fathers. For me, it was important to make sure that space was protected and sacred and just for the men, so I didn’t partake in the therapy sessions. But when I started going in and interviewing the fathers, I was met with such openness that was beautiful; everyone really wanted to share.
We don’t know why the fathers are in jail. How did you make the choice to leave that out?
NR: Every child deserves love and access to their parents, and [keeping] that in mind was really important for us. Also, the way that Chad opened up the fatherhood circles was by saying, “We’re never going to talk about your sentences. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here to talk about fatherhood and your daughters.”
AP: We want to humanize the fathers, not judge them. One of my favorite parts of the film is when one of the girls says, “I don’t know what my daddy did; what your daddy do? I’m going to ask my daddy.” And then everybody watching is probably like, “What is it?” But you never find out. I love that we did that.
Most documentaries about prisons show lots of imagery of confinement like bars, handcuffs, and barbed wire. But your film did the opposite. Can you talk about the cinematography?
NR: The film’s main theme has always been about the wisdom of the girls: their imagination, the connections they forge with their fathers. It’s that wisdom that led us. One girl spoke a lot about her dreams and memories of being in nature with him. That led us to follow her wonder, imagination, and whimsy. All of our filmmaking choices came from the girls and our conversations with them. With respect to the fathers, we didn’t want to make a prison film.
Aubrey Smith
Looking at the father-daughter relationship as a mirror to oneself, and as a way to think about who we might attract to us for the rest of our lives, is incredibly powerful and relatable.
Angela Patton
Donte Brooks, Allan James, Leonard Smith, and Jeffrey Saunders
The film took eight years to complete. When you sat down to edit, what was your process of wading through all of the footage?
NR: We filmed mostly in 2019, but before that, we filmed with other folks that had gone through the program, and some of its champions. We were trying to figure out what our film was. There are well over two hundred hours. What we did in 2019 was just a lot of living and breathing and hanging with the girls at home. Cinema verité films take a lot longer; you just have to let everything unfold.
AP: We didn’t want this to be a talking head documentary, and the editor was really great at thinking about how these families are being portrayed and how we can learn from them. So the editing, for me, was just capturing all of that across the length of a documentary feature.
NR: Our editor, Adelina Bichiș, is amazing. At the beginning, we worked with an editor, Troy Lewis, who was also an emerging filmmaker. He was really strong and we also brought him to D.C. for a bit so that he could actually meet the girls and get to know everyone. Immersing him with the families felt really important, rather than just looking at the footage. When we started to edit, we did so with just verité, no voice-over, and tried to figure out the story we wanted to tell just through footage. We laid out these four-hour-long stories per girl. Then we started intercutting and made a five-hour assembly.
Troy really helped us craft the verité, which is so tedious and time-consuming. That took a year and a half, full time. And then once that was feeling pretty good in a three-hour edit, we all took a step back so that we could see it again with fresh eyes. It was both Angela's and my first time editing a feature-length documentary, and it’s easy to get lost in the ocean sometimes.
When we returned to the edit, this time with Adelina, she had the balance of narrative and documentary background — and that’s something we wanted to keep honing in on stylistically. It was beautiful to be able to work with different people and let them bring their different strengths to it.
Since 2014, jails and prisons have been taking away in-person visits, also called touch visits. Can you talk a little bit more about why that is and what the father-daughter dance and in-person visits mean for families?
AP: Technology makes prisons money. So it’s easier, and a moneymaker, for jails and prisons to just do these screen visits. There are some jails where visitors physically go to the prison to talk to their loved ones through a screen. Girls For Change, and other organizations like it, however, can go into jails and prisons and help facilitate this moment where families can touch. Hopefully, the more of these we do, the more staff in jails and prisons can see that screen visits don’t help families financially or emotionally.
NR: There are interesting studies and books I’ve been reading about the power of touch to also impact trauma and a fight-or-flight response. Having the ability to touch can help someone on a very physical level. Watching fathers and daughters talk about touch as a need made so much sense. The first thing they would say is, “I just want to be able to touch them.” It’s just such a primary need. It’s been really powerful to uncover that because at the beginning of this, we didn’t realize that touch would be such a through line. It was something that everyone brought up. And then finding out that hundreds and hundreds of places are shutting down touch visits is heartbreaking.
What is your biggest hope for this film?
AP: I’m hoping that the film can be used as a tool for awareness, changing policy, and even changing your own mindset on how you live and forgive. Can you take a step back and think about what it means to just be holistic in your approach to people who don’t look like you, who have a different background than you? Can you look differently at what it means to be treated fairly and how freedom works? And that’s why I say the film is universal; I think everyone can connect to that.
