‘It’s about the bravery the girls had to find’: the prison film where convicts dance with their daughters

In a correctional facility in Washington DC, a group of fathers are dressed in smart suits. They shuffle on the plastic chairs, fussing with their ties and craning their necks in anticipation. Eventually, a door swings open, and a parade of young girls in prom dresses begin to make their way down the hallway. For one day only, their incarcerated fathers have been permitted to change out of their jumpsuits.

“It gets you when they walk down the hallway,” says Angela Patton, the co-director of Daughters , a striking new documentary that follows four daughters and their incarcerated fathers as they prepare for a daddy-daughter dance. It got me, too, seeing the girls walk down that jail corridor, eyes searching frantically for their dads. Some of them hadn’t hugged their fathers in years.

Patton is a community activist from Richmond, Virginia, who has organised 13 of these dances since 2008. But no matter how many of them she attends, she says it’s always emotional. Each time, Patton says, “I have to excuse myself and go to the ladies’ room and get myself together.”

The documentary premiered at the Sundance film festival earlier this year, where it won two audience awards, for best documentary and overall festival favourite. Sensing its power, Netflix scooped it up just a few days later.

After giving a Ted Talk about the dances back in 2012, Patton was approached by several people who wanted to make a film about the outreach programme she had founded. All of them were men. “I could tell their willingness to work with me was all about ‘I need access to the prison’,” she says. They wanted to focus on the fathers, and to learn why they were inside. But for Patton, the story belonged to the daughters, whose idea it was to bring the dance into the jail, and who wrote a letter to the then Richmond city sheriff that helped make the first dance happen. Our society, says Patton, likes to tell children what to do. “Children don’t really have a say,” she adds. It was Patton who hand-delivered the letter. “I always say: I’m not going to be a dream crusher.”

Natalie Rae, who co-directed the film, had been sent Patton’s Ted Talk by a friend. “I had goosebumps, I was crying, and my heart was pounding,” she remembers. She was struck by the way Patton listened to young people, “like they’re equals”.

They made the documentary over an eight-year period, though it wasn’t until 2019 that they found their protagonists. There is Aubrey, an irrepressibly bubbly five-year-old who is “the smartest one in class”; 10-year-old Santana, whose dad’s absence fills her with righteous fury; 11-year-old Ja’Ana, who is eager to see her father but doesn’t remember him because her mother had refused to let her visit him behind bars; and 15-year-old Raziah, a high-school student struggling with her mental health.

My expectation of how cold or tough the guys were was completely turned on its head

Natalie Rae

The girls express a mix of excitement and trepidation, longing tinged with scepticism. But Patton and Rae pay attention to the things they don’t say, too. “We pick up their energy and try to translate that for the screen,” says Rae. A scene of Santana on roller skates uses bold neon lighting to depict the intensity of her inner life. Patton and Rae wanted to show different ways of coping with having an incarcerated parent.

“It’s really important that people aren’t seeing this as a prison rehabilitation film,” says Rae. “It’s about the bravery that these girls had to find forgiveness.” But like the Oscar-nominated Time (2020), about a mother raising a family while her husband is inside, The Work (2017), which follows a group therapy session in a high-security men’s prison, and 13th (2016), Ava DuVernay’s take on the prison industrial complex, Daughters makes an impassioned case for more humane treatment of those serving time, and more consideration for their families.

Rae, who grew up in Vancouver, had never been inside a jail before. “My expectations of how cold or tough the guys would be were completely turned on their head.” In order to attend the dance with their girls, the dads must complete a 10-week counselling course. In the film, “healing circles” take place in a light-filled chapel, where the group reflect on fatherhood, as well as their mistakes. Crucially, the film withholds the specifics of their sentences. “They’re asking for forgiveness, and trying to forgive themselves first. It’s very humanising,” says Patton.

Rae found the fathers to be “gentle and chill and eloquent”. Patton describes them as “teddy bears”, and not “these hardcore brothers that usually have to make themselves known on the streets”. At the end of the film, we learn that 95% of fathers who complete the programme don’t reoffend. In other words, being able to hug and dance with their daughters has a powerful effect. The film zeroes in on the tenderness of human touch, like a ruffled ear or an arm slung round a shoulder. Touch, says Rae, “calms your nervous system, and can stay with you, preventing a fight-or-flight response” in the body. “When you’re older, that need doesn’t go away,” she adds.

But “touch visits”, in which incarcerated people are allowed physical contact with their loved ones, are changing. Increasingly, they are being replaced by video visits . “It’s not because of Covid – it was happening before,” says Rae. “It’s a cost-cutting thing,” she says. She and Patton found that many prison workers were excited about the new technologies, arguing that it was more convenient for the families, with incarcerated people able to FaceTime into birthday parties. “But they’re charging a monthly fee, and they’re charging per FaceTime,” says Rae. “It’s profiting from family separation, and obviously the prisons are getting a kickback for letting the tech companies set up those platforms.” Never mind the bad quality audio and video, or the fact that the kids are so dismayed by the experience that they usually don’t return: setting up an iPad is cheaper than staffing a visitation room.

Still, the documentary never feels like a campaign. Rae and Patton filmed the dance itself on 16mm film stock to honour its uniqueness and “to capture the exact light, on celluloid, in real time”, says Rae. “People thought we were crazy: you have one chance to get this dance, and you’re going to shoot on film?!’” The fathers present their daughters with corsages, make them earnest promises, and dance to Before I Let Go by Frankie Beverley and Maze. Through their tears, the girls tell their fathers to be brave.

According to Rae, the film’s cinematographer, Michael Cambio Fernandez, cried so much watching the girls descend down the hallway that his viewfinder became fogged with tears. He wasn’t sure if the scene would be in focus. The dance is the film’s emotional climax but Patton and Rae chose not to end things there and, as Patton puts it, “put a big beautiful bow” on the story.

Instead, Patton and Rae continued to follow the girls, some of whose fathers have since been released. “A lot of times, people just want to know: did they graduate? Did they go to college? What is their income now?” says Patton. “It’s those things they feel say you’ve made it.” It’s sadder, and more real, to see some of Aubrey’s sparkle dimming as, at age seven, she accepts the reality of her situation.

When the girls saw the final film, they cringed at their younger selves. “Their responses are typical teenage girls’ responses,” says Patton. Aubrey, who is now 10, turned to her after a screening in New York and declared: “Oh my God, that little girl is so annoying !” Raziah, who battles depression in the film, said: “I’m hard! Why did y’all let people see me cry?!”

But both Rae and Patton insist that the screenings have been cathartic, and that sharing their stories has helped the girls to strip away some of the stigma associated with having an incarcerated parent. “You don’t leave feeling sorry for them,” says Patton. “You see that they’re going to be OK.”

Daughters is on Netflix from 14 August .