Daughters review – heartbreaking record of girls and their imprisoned fathers

It took less than two minutes into this Netflix documentary about a “daddy-and-daughter” prom dance at a prison in Washington DC to get my waterworks going. A little girl of five or six, dressed up in a frilly white party dress, is crying. It’s all too much – the dance, the big feelings; her body shakes with sobs. Then her dad holds her face and pulls the girl in tight. It’s an intimate moment, emotional and desperately sad – because for some of the girls this dance might be the only time they will get to hug their dads during their prison sentences. There are jails in the US, we learn, that are phasing out face-to-face visits, replacing them with video calls (which prisons cynically monetise by charging families a monthly fee for the platform).

Daughters is co-directed by Angela Patton; she is a woman with an inexhaustible supply of energy who has been organising dances for girls and their incarcerated dads since 2013. Her film feels like a companion piece or B-side to Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th. That was an intellectually rigorous, angry lesson about mass incarceration in the US, which has the highest prison population in the world, disproportionately black and brown. What Daughters does is to look at the human cost, lives destroyed, families devastated and children traumatised by separation.

It’s a tender, painful, intimate film, made over several years as we watch four girls in the months before the dance. There’s Aubrey, a sunny, talkative five-year-old: “I’m the smartest one in my class.” Ten-year-old Santana hides her hurt and disappointment behind a mask of sullen resentment. Ja’Ana, 11, has never visited her father in prison; 15-year-old Raziah has experienced some worrying mental-health episodes. Meanwhile, in the run-up to the prom, the dads get measured up for thrift-store suits and attend a 10-week programme with a fatherhood coach. He is blunt about the future, post-prison: “There is a negative statistic out there waiting for you.” A more heartwarming one comes at the end of the film: 95% of fathers who have been to a daddy-daughter dance have not returned to prison.

• Daughters is in US and UK cinemas from 9 August, and on Netflix from 14 August.