Rain is a thematic undercurrent in Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s documentary, Daughters. Over the phone, a seven year old Aubrey asks her dad if he remembers when it was “raining so bad”. Through the crackling connection of the prison phone line, Aubrey’s father assures her that he recalls this shared memory. Voiceover of a ten-year-old Santana—whose father is also incarcerated—recalling a nightmare where her parents left her forever is backlit by pink lightning on a dusk sky.
Daughters is a documentary made in part with Angela Patton, activist and creator of the “Date With Dad” organization, a program which organizes prom-style dances for daughters and their incarcerated fathers. These dances are not guaranteed or regular events. And for many of these girls, it may be the only time she touches her father while he fulfills his prison sentence.
The rhetoric of Daughters is easy to empathize with: we watch young girls be forcibly separated from their fathers after only a few hours of holding one another for the first time in years. This is a heartbreaking image that feels supremely hard to justify.
This is not a signal of emotional manipulation, though, it’s evidence of how extremely easy it is to find cruelty, injustice, and heartbreak built into the fabric of the American prison system. Daughters is essential viewing in its insistence that we sit with the pain, grief, and ongoing that countless American families sit with daily under the oppression of the modern, for-profit prison system.
In the opening moments of the film, Patton reflects on her community work with young black girls, stating, “Girls already know what they need. The wisdom lives inside of them.”
Daughters makes it stunningly obvious what these girls need, and what simple rights are being denied to them through the incarceration of their fathers. These girls want to be held. They want to be able to bicker with and fawn over their fathers, and to be bickered with and fawned over by their fathers in turn. They want to be able to test the waters in their families and know they are still loved. They want to be confident in the notion that they are inherently deserving of present and active parents. But almost none of these basic desires are offered to these girls in meaningful or sustainable ways because of the current state of the prison system.
Aubrey, one of Daughters’ central subjects, is a smart, ambitious, precious, and precocious young girl. She has hopes that her father will be home before she’s thirteen. She explains that she learned from a recent science lesson that her dad will be home in only seven more cycles around the sun.
Her father’s final release date (which will be when Aubrey is much older than twelve), is placed over the image of rain beating against her bedroom window—more of Daughters stormy imagery.
As if our very justice system being built on a history of enslaved people and the valuing of for-profit systems over human life is not enough of a social blight, Daughters reveals the intricacies in which the American incarceration system insists on further dismantling families and communities through a systemic limitation of communication and connection. As many of the mothers, who are desperately trying to keep their children in contact with their fathers, point out in Daughters, the barriers to connection are endless within the prison system. Calls between the prison and families can cost five dollars each. Visits between incarcerated men and their children, if they are permitted at all, are often over video, with families and incarcerated people separated into entirely different sections of the prison.
“I would like to touch her, so it could reset,” one father mourns after a touchless, uncomfortable, and detached visit with his daughter. It is unfathomable what is lost in the inability to hold your child. I’m not certain I can conceive of a human so radically, deeply, fundamentally flawed—as the prison system delusionally, cruelly, and oppressively suggests all incarcerated people are—that they should not be permitted to hold their daughter when she wants to be held.
There is joy still, in Daughters. People laugh, dance, joke, and express joy. But this feels less like a silver lining and more like a basic acknowledgement of human experience. Of course there’s joy. Of course there’s laughter. These are humans existing in a depressingly rare intimate moment amongst their loved ones. These happy moments do not as much evoke a sense of hopeful resilience (though these families have resilience many times over), as they do give weight to the immense tragedy that is “the norm” for this community.
Even more obvious than what is lost in our current prison system, is what is gained when one is free from it. Santana’s father is one of the few incarcerated subjects to be released from prison in Daughters. Near the end of the film, we see a quiet evening in their life four years after their dance. The footage is littered with evidence of all of the ways her father’s freedom makes Santana’s family’s life easier—he is there to carry her baby sibling, to make sure his family enjoys a meal out, to make a bad joke in the car that equally delights and embarrasses his kid.
The last time it rains in Daughters, it’s onto a laughing Santana. She’s seated on the hood of the car and basking in the unmitigated presence of her loving father, a human right that, in the context of this film, is twisted into a rare and special privilege.
