The Sundance documentary Daughters has landed at Netflix.
The feature follows four young girls as they prepare for a daddy daughter dance, which is a chance to reunite with their incarcerated fathers as part of a fatherhood program in a Washington, D.C. prison. Daughters took home the audience award in the documentary competition and earned the festival favorite award.
Directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae are behind the feature. Patton is the CEO of Girls for a Change, a non-profit that launched the Date with Dad Program, which holds a dance for the daughters of men incarcerated in a D.C. prison. The documentary details a ten-week program the men enter upon in preparation for the dance, as well as the anticipation the girls feel for the big day.
“Daughters peaks an hour in with the father-daughter dance, which is astonishing and as potent as you could hope for. From the preparations for the dance, on both sides of the prison walls, to the moment at which the girls tentatively walk down the hallway to where their fathers wait, dressed up in suits measured just for this occasion, is one fireball of sentiment after another,” wrote Daniel Fienberg in his review for The Hollywood Reporter. “The actual interactions between the fathers and daughters at the dance are varied in their beauty, awkwardness and familial tension. But this sequence comes so early, and then the last 40 minutes of the documentary are a string of ‘Well, I guess since we’re still filming’ add-ons and postscripts of decidedly mixed impact.”
