by Gill Pringle
If you blink, you will almost certainly miss Joel Edgerton’s fleeting appearance in Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s powerful documentary, Daughters.
A moving portrait of forgiveness, Daughters traces an eight-year journey made by social change advocate Patton and filmmaker Rae, following four young girls as they prepare for an emotional Daddy Daughter Dance with their incarcerated fathers, as part of a unique fatherhood program in a Washington, D.C. prison.
This special night has not come easily, the fathers agreeing to participate in ten weeks of counseling with a fatherhood life coach while the daughters experience a whole range of emotions from apprehension to joy and everything in between.
The healing power of these real life Daddy Daughter Dances is something that resonated with Edgerton ever since he tuned into Patton’s powerful TED talk on the subject several years earlier.
A white knight of sorts, he signed on as an executive producer on the documentary, even helping supply the mens’ suits for the dance, briefly seen in the prison hall used for the father-daughter reunion.
“Joel has been a real mentor to me,” explains Patton when we meet with her at a Los Angeles awards screening of Daughters, with Netflix backing the documentary which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, picking up the Audience and Festival Favorite Awards.
“Joel’s taught me a lot about the business and we’re hopefully having dinner tonight, when he flies in from London,” she says of the Australian actor and filmmaker, revealing how it is Edgerton’s goal to ultimately make a feature film centering around the Daddy Daughter Dances.
Certainly, the statistics are persuasive, and in the 12 years since Patton launched the program, 95% of the participating fathers have not returned to prison.
But Edgerton was not alone in recognising the program’s undeniable power for change, Patton inundated with requests to either make a documentary or a feature film about her work.
“So, when I actually received an email from Natalie, she was probably the 30th person who emailed asking me to turn the TED Talk into a film, and I rejected them all, or aborted them because they really wanted to focus on the men, or getting access to a prison,” she recalls.
“The work that I do every day is show up as a CEO of a nonprofit organisation and open up a door and create programs and do research on how to advance black girls’ lives.
“I understood immediately, because of the work, that it needed to be a story that was told through the lens of the girls, because it came from them. If someone wasn’t going to centre the girls, they wouldn’t be a good partner for me. I could see we would have a lot of battles. There was no need to enter into that fire,” adds Patton who found Rae’s approach to be more aligned with her own.
Rae had certainly given much thought to the idea of a documentary. “Angela’s TED talk is so powerful, and I hadn’t really come across something like that. It just shook my soul so deeply. And I think there were a number of things, like the relationship with my father, and understanding how universal this story would be for girls that wanted more out of that relationship and a deeper emotional connection, particularly to their father,” says Rae.
“I’d also been making short documentaries since I was little, and really focused on a lot of young women’s stories, and had worked with UN Women and Melinda Gates, and I found the positioning a little frustrating, because it seemed to be that we were talking down to young women, like, ‘Hey, girls, get empowered! Like, do what you want! Be loud!’ And I just thought if I was nine or ten, I wouldn’t want people talking down to me like that. We should be making space for young women; that we’re the ones who should do the work to get empowered for them, and fathers and society should have the onus of that work.
“So, when I heard Angela’s TED talk, she said those very words, like the wisdom lives inside of them; they know what they need to thrive. And that just resonated so deeply. And I felt like this was the type of story that the world really needed to see – and so eternally grateful that she trusted me with this very delicate story,” she says.
Patton has been working with young people for more than two decades as CEO of Girls for a Change, a nonprofit that empowers Black girls in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia.
One of her programs, Date with Dad, hosts a father-daughter dance for girls whose fathers are incarcerated, creating a unique opportunity for separated families to experience a rare moment of togetherness despite the obstacles of the prison system.
Mirroring this work, Daughters intimately follows Aubrey, Santana, Raziah, and Ja’Ana as they prepare for a momentous Daddy Daughter Dance with their incarcerated fathers. Speaking openly about their aspirations, dreams, and the emotional toll of their fathers’ absence, compounded by the constraints of virtual visits, these girls reveal a profound wisdom and resilience beyond their years. As they navigate heartbreak, anger, and uncertainty, they seize a precious opportunity to forge connections.
The compelling doco sheds light on the complexities of familial bonds strained by the unforgiving barriers of the criminal justice system and emphasises that the foundation of community healing lies within the family unit.
With Patton and Rae at the helm, Daughters’ executive producers include not just Edgerton – but also actress Kerry Washington, cinematographer Lance Acord, Jerry Seinfeld’s wife Jessica and Quentin Tarantino’s longtime AD Pilar Savone among many others.
Fiercely protective of her “girls”, Patton was never going to be anyone’s pushover, refusing to reveal any of the featured men’s crimes in the film.
“There’s a lot of feedback when you’re editing documentaries, but what we wanted to do with the film was really unify people as human beings. It’s a really complicated story. There are themes of race, the criminal justice system, gender.
“This, at a time where a lot of films really want to tell you something and prove something, and the world is so divisive and everyone is pitted against each other,” says Rae.
“And so, how could we create an experience where those things dissolve and we’re really melting down these walls and opening hearts, and so all the decisions that we made were really just to immerse ourselves in that love story,” she says.
Adds Patton: “Our film is both personal and universal. It’s an intimate story and it’s also a paradigm-shifting look into the long and devastating legacy of the prison-industrial complex on Black communities, and most importantly, the ingenuity of Black girls who fight back against it.
“This film narrows the aperture to an immediate suffering: too many families, including children, bear the brunt of their loved ones’ incarceration. They are cut off – stuck behind Plexiglass and struggling to afford costly video calls. Through music, touch and movement, the dance tackles all senses and creates a memory that impacts trauma.
“Our collaboration and vision has always centred on the wisdom of the girls. We worked together to ensure that we told the most imaginative, dignifying story possible. Following the fathers’ journey through fatherhood circles in the jail, we aim to humanise these Black men.
“On the outside, we allow the girls’ worlds to be vivid, complex and raw. These are the sides of Black characters that we don’t often see on screen, and that we desperately need to see more of. The girls take us through their challenging circumstances with tenderness and light. They inspire us to look at family wounds and the transformative power of human touch.
“This is not a sad story. This is a love story. It is a healing story about the ways in which those experiencing the worst of our country’s broken systems often have the best ideas for how to stay human within them until revolution comes,” she asserts.
Daughters is streaming now on Netflix
