DAUGHTERS - Mark Reviews Movies

Daughters, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 13, 2024

Some of the issues with prison system in the United States come into view as filmmakers Angela Patton and Natalie Rae spotlight an encouraging program to help some of them. Daughters revolves around a prison in Washington, D.C., where a group of inmates have agreed to participate in a 10-week seminar about fatherhood. The men's reward for participating is a father-daughter dance, which will be held in the prison gymnasium. These men have not seen their daughters in person in years or ever, depending on when the girls were born or how long the men have been incarcerated.

The idea of the program—started at a prison in Richmond, Virgina, by Patton and her organization Girls for a Change some years before the film's timeline—is a most hopeful one. Here are men who spend their days in the dehumanizing routine and bureaucracy of a prison, where changes have been made in recent years that restrict access to their families even more than most might realize.

In this prison, for example, there are no longer in-person meetings with loved ones. The room where such encounters would have taken place in the past has been converted into lines of stone cubicles, each one housing a monitor and a telephone for video calls. For some of the inmates in the program, this is the only way they have seen their children, and considering the obvious psychological consequences of such a separation, there's likely a good legal challenge to be made that such treatment is certainly unusual and, based on the emotional turmoil revealed on all sides of these family dynamics, clearly cruel.

This is about the men, of course, but the film is so in a particular way. There's only one brief, passing mention of one of the inmate's crimes. The focus isn't on what they did to end up in prison, because it's irrelevant to the subtle and blunt cases being made by the filmmakers. The primary understated one is that we do look at these men, not as inmates serving time for this or that crime, but as people living their lives with only two goals in mind. The first, obviously, is to leave prison when their sentences—some of them up in the air due to court proceedings and prison decisions—are finished.

The second is not to return. Some of them have been in prison multiple times. Others are certain that, without some kind of change to their lives, reincarceration is inevitable. They need a reason to live on the outside, in the real world, and with some sense of being more than a prison-assigned number, a list of offenses, and all of those years in prison defining who they are and could be.

As much as it's about the men in prison, though, this film is about their daughters. We meet them first or almost immediately after a brief introduction to a father here. They're of different ages, ranging from as young as 5 to as old as 15, and all of them do want to have some kind of connection with their absent fathers. The occasional phone or video call, the number and duration of which start to diminish based on prison policy as the years of the narrative pass, isn't nearly enough for what they want and, as the film makes painfully apparent (if it somehow weren't so from a basic level of empathy, which is sometimes lost on incarcerated people by individuals and society), need.

Patton and Rae's documentary focuses on four of these girls and their fathers. Aubrey, aged 5 at the start, is proud of being the smartest girl in her class, in part because her father Keith always pushes for her to do well and bring home as many certificates of accomplishment from school as possible. She has, as the walls of the living room in the house where the girl lives with her mother Lashawn can attest, and they keep arriving so regularly that they're starting to adorn the walls of Aubrey's bedroom. Otherwise, her relationship with her father is simply remembering that he'll be home in either seven or ten years, and as good as Aubrey is with her multiplication tables at such a young age, her notion of time is that youthful disdain for anything that isn't right now.

We meet the other daughters—11-year-old Ja'Ana, 10-year-old Santana, 15-year-old Raziah—and their fathers—respectively, Frank, Mark, and Alonzo. The stories are essentially the same, although the men's sentences are different—one of them is looking at decades in prison—and two of them might be coming home in a matter of a year or two.

The film seems to reach its climax with the dance, which is alternately lovely and, as some of the girls wrestle with the mixed emotions of seeing their fathers and the fathers have to finally say good-bye, tough to watch. However, the project gradually reveals how much time the filmmakers have spent with their subjects, as well as how time can be either a force for healing or deterioration depending on the circumstances of how it's spent.

What we see for sure is that this program does have the potential of changing lives, with some statistics provided at the end in case the human stories on screen aren't convincing enough as an argument. In between the lines of the more uplifting stories in the film, though, Daughters forces us to consider more difficult questions. The biggest one is why this single event of the dance is so unique and necessary in the lives of these fathers and their daughters. Any system that relegates people's basic humanity to a one-off occurrence is in need of a significant reappraisal.

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