In 2013, Angela Patton gave a TEDX Women Talk that captured a lot of attention. She publicly talked about a program she established in Richmond, Virginia, which focused on uniting girls with their fathers who are imprisoned. To this day, the program’s effects are noticeable, and it has been expanding to others prisons. The documentary codirected by Patton called “Daughters,” is about the first of these dances which was held in Washington D.C. She recalls that after she wrote to the man proposing this idea, he replied quickly saying: “No one has even asked for a moment”.
To manage his emotions and not regret his actions, the fathers must complete a 10 week program. One of the participants, for example, has never witnessed even a conversation between men about their emotions. For him, this has been a new experience. Despite the title’s indication, Patton and codirector Natalie Rae place the girls and four in particular at the heart of the tale. The first time we see Aubrey, she is a cute five year old girl.
She enjoys knowing that she is the brightest in her class and she has a wall full of her achievements and certificates. In particular, she loves doing arithmetic and has committed the multiplication tables to memory. As she continues to talk about the significance of the numbers, it becomes clear why those numbers are so important to her; she is trying to determine when her father’s seven year sentence, which is longer than the years she has been alive, would end.
The trauma of missing their fathers has made the girls feel the agony of many reasons which leads to poor decisions. For example, Santana aged 10 has a better understanding of her father and with two further younger siblings feels that she has to be the dad of the family. She sternly claims that yes, she may choose to marry one day but never to bear children. “I don’t even know what his face looks like, I don’t even know what my father looks like” said Ja’Ana, who is 11, assimilating the situation with a lot of grief. Ra ziah, aged 15 carries cynicism, anguish and hate within her even to the extent of contemplating suicide. However, the most striking case is the one deposed by one of the men: he told the group that the first time he had sex with the mother of his daughter he was 13 years old his daughter was born when he was 14, as it was she who gave birth. He knows that if the girl. There is also a paternity figure in the movie, cinematographer Michael Fernandez and composer Kelsey Lu with soft sounds, decoratively enrich the image, and the girls seem more innocent. Little slow motion effects allow you to feel the effectiveness of warm days and the “long long thoughts” of babies.
The moving programs that Patton implements show children the importance of Black mothers and daughters as members of society as they strive to feel strong, bring encouragement to their impact, and be leaders in the community. Patton is aware of the accomplishments of these mothers and wishes for them to have a sense of sisterhood. By facilitating the girls’ relationships with their fathers, she is also assisting the mothers. “When our families are intact, our communities rise.”
There are than hundreds of striking and well placed scenes in the movie “Daughters” which won both the documentary Audience award and the Festival Favorite in Sundance. When the fathers are shown changing out of their orange prison uniforms to half a jacket and a tie it becomes emotionally intense. It becomes even more potent when we witness other fathers showing their kids how to tie a tie, an activity we associate with father son bonding and milestones these men were not able to achieve, all the way to the interviews for office jobs. It is majestic to see men wearing boutonnieres only to see them pass these flowers on to daughters while they are taking them off for sad goodbyes as the flowers serve as pieces of jewel with sentimental meaning.
The essence here is that as one of the characters says in American fiction, ‘Nobody is as evil as on his worst day.’ They are fathers. By extension, not being able to partake in their lives adds to their pain. More importantly, their daughters are in need of them. Just as in the Rehabilitation through the arts program highlighted in the movie conducted at “Sing Sing” that has a re cedivism rate of about three percent for those who participated in the fatherhood program. One of the fathers in one of the updates at the end indicates that he had never spent more than six months outside the ‘walls’ since his teenage years until when he realized how crucial it is being a father to his daughter. Last time he was released was four years ago and he was keen on remaining out of the prison.
There are some prisons which don’t allow face to face visits anymore and these have been replaced with remote connections which are quite costly (for the families). After so many years without physically embracing one another, the fathers and daughters appeared calm and relieved after sharing so much unending stress and sadness. For one of the fathers, He said, “For those six hours, I was not in prison.”
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