Joyous and heartbreaking ‘Daughters’ reunites girls with their incarcerated dads
LA Times“Daughters” looks at the Date With Dad program that reunites Black girls, like Aubrey, with their incarcerated fathers for a kind of father-daughter prom. “Natalie’s email was the only one that really centered the girls,” says Patton, who joined Rae in a recent Zoom conversation. So every layer of the project had people that were authentic, that were open, that were funny, playful, had big, open hearts, and that made the difference.” The film, says director Natalie Rae, was looking to “encapsulate some of the whimsical, imaginative qualities of the girls and the light that they carry.” Rae cites as inspirations such documentaries as RaMell Ross’ “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” which collapses years of Black life in west Alabama into 76 lyrical minutes, and Garrett Bradley’s “Time,” which makes powerful use of its subject’s home videos to chronicle her efforts to free her husband from a Louisiana prison. “We had to actually downscale to shooting on a Blackmagic, just a little tiny camera, because we didn’t have money for so many years to keep it going.” The incarcerated men traded their prison orange for suits and ties to spend time with their daughters.
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