Directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae, Executive Producer Kerry Washington and subjects Aubrey Smith, Mark Grimes and Advocate Chad Morris stop by The Hollywood Reporter's studio during the Sundance film festival to talk about their documentary 'Daughters,' about four young girls who prepare for a special daddy-daughter dance with their incarcerated fathers. Patton and Rae discuss the "de-humanizing" experience for young girls who want to visit their fathers in jail and the impact this documentary had on families.
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00:00 It's so clear that fathers need their daughters and that daughters need their fathers and
00:04 that we need to be able to be in community and not stuck behind plexiglass or monitors
00:11 and electronic devices.
00:14 We need to be in community.
00:16 The fact that you can't touch your child is just, it's inhumane.
00:23 I was asked to do a TED Talk about the father-daughter dance in the jail.
00:27 I had many filmmakers reach out to me after the TED Talk and said they thought that this
00:32 would be a great story to tell to the world.
00:36 I did as well, but I had other storytellers.
00:42 Sometimes the local news, a journalist would come in and I wasn't always satisfied with
00:48 the story because they would leave out one key point and that was the girls.
00:54 The girls who actually came up with an idea to connect with their fathers on their own
00:59 terms.
01:01 When Natalie reached out to me, she got it.
01:04 She understood that the girls need to be at the forefront and also invited me to be a
01:09 co-director because she understood that representation mattered.
01:14 She understood that I knew the families and so together we were able to bring our strengths,
01:19 our talents, our community has also been supportive of making this into the doc that we have today.
01:26 It happened organically, but throughout the process we also broke down the boundaries
01:32 of a typical doc together.
01:34 When I saw Angela's TED Talk, it just was such a powerful story and I've worked a lot
01:38 in the women's space and it was just one of the most powerful examples of what could happen
01:43 when we listen to young women's ideas.
01:47 We met, we really saw very similar.
01:49 We've got similar tastes in music and visuals and all those kind of things.
01:52 We just love the same stuff and we also knew the power of the music and the dance and the
01:57 touch and these elements that we really wanted to bring out as threads in the film.
02:02 Each year the film needs something different.
02:04 Honestly, we thought it might only take two or three years, but we actually took three
02:08 years to get a dance filmed because the program went on hold.
02:13 Things happened so then we finally got a dance filmed in 2019.
02:16 Then there's a pandemic, there's all these other obstacles, funding, so we just always
02:20 have each other's backs and I think can wear many hats together.
02:24 It's been great, great collaboration.
02:26 What was your favorite part about the process of being in the documentary?
02:29 It would probably be the father daughter dance because that's the time I got to see my dad
02:34 the most and we had lots of fun.
02:38 That's probably the best memory I've had in my whole life.
02:41 Learning more and more as the film went on, I think even before COVID, hundreds of facilities
02:46 were stopping in person visitation rooms and even stopping the visits on either side of
02:53 a glass wall and replacing that with video apps, video visits or letting tech companies
03:00 come in and actually charge families.
03:02 It could be like $7 a text message, $15 for a video visit.
03:07 The prices are insane and then they make this experience so dehumanizing and end up causing
03:15 more damage and a lot of the girls that we've spoken to have just said they don't even want
03:20 to do these visits and stuff like that.
03:24 It's really important for people to see what it's doing on that side and understand the
03:28 cost both financially and just what it does to people's lives.
03:32 I went to this very elite, fancy private school for high school and at our school we had a
03:39 father daughter dance and I always saw that as something that more privileged communities
03:43 do.
03:44 I never unpacked why that is.
03:47 Why would that be?
03:48 To hear about this really special tradition that's so important in the maintenance of
03:54 a bond between a father and daughter being taken into a space where people are so dehumanized,
04:00 I thought this is a really powerful idea and I immediately wanted to watch it and learn
04:05 more about it.
04:06 What was it like watching the footage of the documentary and seeing it all together?
04:12 What is that like?
04:13 Just to see the part throughout the documentary where we sitting down, because we was incarcerated
04:23 at the time so we had our suits and ties on and we was all lined up and our daughters
04:29 came from down the hallway in a line.
04:34 Just to see that from the outside looking in, it was just, like I said, it was life
04:39 changing.
04:40 Then fast forward to when we had to let reality really kick in when our daughters had to leave
04:48 us and people cried, daughters cried.
04:54 Some daughters didn't understand, "Why he not coming with us?"
04:58 They didn't really understand.
04:59 If our message get out there, I think that it'll change a lot of people's lives because
05:05 even if you're not a parent, you're still somebody's child.
05:08 I just want to shout out these two over here because you guys are community organizers.
05:14 You transform.
05:15 You're in the community every day in Richmond, Virginia.
05:18 You have been for years, before the film, after the film.
05:21 I think part of what we want people to understand is that when you watch the movie, if you want
05:26 there to be change, you don't actually have to reinvent the wheel.
05:29 There are people dedicated to transforming communities and making the world a better
05:32 place and they are doing this heavy lifting every single day.
05:36 Those who watch the film, who don't participate in conversations or read press or hear from
05:40 Angela won't know that it really started with the power of voice and for our youth voice,
05:46 our daughters in particularly, but also for me as an advocate for fathers being accountable,
05:53 putting them in a position to have conversations among themselves and then being challenged
05:58 enough to find a plate to step up to not only to advocate and be present for your child
06:04 as best you can, but be willing to take the charge of carrying the shield of, "Hey, I
06:10 was transparent in this space and you can see a glimpse into my life."
06:14 Because the men that are behind the wall don't have advocates.
06:18 They're classified by number or they're classified by statistic or they're classified by public
06:23 opinion about what it is they've done, classified by crime, classified by conviction, but their
06:29 voice being heard brings it back to the human story.
06:32 This story is being driven by real people in real lives and the work that we do particularly
06:36 is about that.
06:37 So I'm really hopeful that the conversations continue.
06:40 When we tell this story, this happened because a young girl had an idea and these girls wrote
06:45 a letter to their sheriff.
06:47 In a lot of communities, you vote for your sheriff.
06:50 You don't talk about all the down ballot elections that happen, judges, sheriffs, school boards,
06:57 but you have to show up not just to vote for the big elections, the governors, the presidents,
07:01 the senators.
07:02 Those are important, but also that sheriff had the open heart to say, "Let's try to make
07:07 this work.
07:08 Let's see if we can make this work.
07:09 I don't know how it's going to work, but this sounds like a great idea."
07:13 We have to elect people in positions of power that are willing to be led by their community,
07:18 that know that their salaries are paid by our tax dollars, that we don't work for them,
07:22 they work for us.
07:23 [BLANK_AUDIO]