I found myself choking up barely a minute into this heartfelt documentary about a daddy-daughter dance scheme for the girls of incarcerated fathers in Washington DC, such is the emotional wallop of this terrific, Sundance prize-winning film.
Co-directed with a supreme assurance that falls just on the right side of slickness by music video director Natalie Rae and Angela Patton – activist and founder of the Date With Dad weekend – Daughters feels like the fortuitously alchemic combination of two very different but complementary voices. Patton’s formidable communication skills, previously demonstrated in a widely viewed Ted Talk, drive a film that has a kinship with, and a similarly wrenching impact to that of the Folsom prison group therapy documentary, The Work. And Rae’s visual flair brings a child’s-eye lyricism to the film that evokes the heady enchantment of Beasts of the Southern Wild. It’s elegantly edited too, by Troy Lewis and Adelina Bichis (whose work I previously admired on the similarly poetic Nascondino).
