These girls haven't hugged their fathers in years. A father-daughter dance in prison gave them the chance to.

In the middle of of the new documentary, Daughters, set inside a Washington D.C. jail that's home to a father-daughter dance, there's a scene in which imprisoned fathers are seated in this hallway, dressed up in their suits and ties for the dance, nervously waiting for the girls. Then, the girls — ranging from five-years-old to 15-years-old — walk into the hallway in a single-file line, looking gorgeous in their princess dresses, styled hair and sparkling shoes. 

The minute the girls see their fathers, they go to them and hug and kiss them for the first time in a long time. The girls are crying, the fathers are crying, and so is everyone else in the room — including the film crew.

"Cambio, our cinematographer, was crying so hard into the viewfinder that he was whispering, 'I don't know what's going to be in focus. I'm just going to pray to God, it's all going to work out,'" Daughters's co-director Natalie Rae says.

Every time Angela Patton, who co-directed the film with Rae, attends one of the father-daughter dances, she cries repeatedly: when the girls are on a bus on the way to the jail, when they see their fathers for the first time and when they have to leave after the dance.

"Not only does the film crew cry, our correctional officers do too," Patton says. "Everybody is, at that point, just a human being, and not our role."

Daughters is able to get so intimate with its subjects because Patton knows everyone involved. She is CEO of Girls For A Change, a leadership organization for Black girls based in Richmond, Virginia, and hosts the father-daughter dance at the nearby D.C. jail as part of their Date with Dad program.

Leading up to the dance, Patton hosts workshops for the girls and their mothers to help them heal from the absence of these men in their lives. She also guest lectures in the mandatory 12-week fatherhood course, that's meant to help the men in jail develop a healthy relationship with their daughters, both at the dance and after it.

The idea for the Date with Dad program came from girls that Patton had worked with in 2009. When they organized a father-daughter dance, one girl said her father couldn't come because he was in prison. Another girl in the group suggested that they bring the dance to her father and host it in the prison. 

When the girls sent a letter to the Richmond sheriff to see if it was possible, he said it was such a "powerful" request that he couldn't turn them down. The dance has been happening ever since. 

"This was really a girls' empowerment story, this is about the idea and the wisdom that young girls have that can change the world," Rae says. "That's a different thing than, 'Oh, we're going to set out to change recidivism.'"

That said, the Date with Dad program has impacted recidivism. Ninety-five percent of the fathers who participate in the program don't return to jail. 

The dance allows the men to see how much their daughters need them. The day after the dance, one of the fathers in the film says: "Yesterday, I actually felt like I can't come back to prison no more."

The idea for Daughters came about after Rae saw Patton's 2012 TED Talk about the Date with Dad program. Patton says she received about 30 inquiries from filmmakers since the TED Talk, but she didn't click with anyone.

When Rae emailed Patton in 2017, she made it clear that she wanted to make this film together. She then flew out to Richmond, Virginia to meet Patton for lunch. Rae was the only filmmaker who visited in-person and offered to collaborate, which got Patton's attention. Rae also met with some of the girls who took part in the Date with Dad program during that visit. 

"Most filmmakers wanted it to focus on the fathers of why they were in prison … a typical jail story," Patton says. "I really wanted this to be a love story."

Patton and Rae agreed that Daughters needs to focus on the girls' perspectives, to tell the love story between a girl and her father.  

Patton insisted on "co-creating" the documentary with the girls, which meant allowing them to do what they would naturally do and film around them, rather than directing them. She says this is why the scene where the fathers see their daughters for the first time feels so real.

"There's nothing that we need to do to create these scenes in the dance … we don't need to add balloons there and glitter and sparkles," Patton says. "That feeling will hit them and you."

Daughters is heartbreaking, but also shows many moments of joy. Like any good love story, it has a makeover montage before the dance, cutting between the girls doing their hair and makeup, and their fathers trading in their jumpsuits for suits and ties. 

"Once we got all of our footage, everything we needed was there," Patton says. "Together with our editor, we put together a magical and extremely change-making story, I believe, for our community."

Daughters made its international premiere at Hot Docs 2024 on May 4. More information is available by clicking here.