📺 ON THE TUBE TONIGHT-
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How do you stay a family when one parent is behind bars? Daughters, winner of the Festival Favorite award at Sundance 2024, follows four girls as they prepare for a father-daughter dance taking place in a US prison.

Directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae don’t treat this event as a spectacle — they give it its due as a profound examination of the emotional struggles faced by these families. This event allows the fathers, who are often only given the chance to communicate with their families through video calls or from behind plexiglass barriers, a chance to spend time with their daughters in the flesh. We see these incarcerated men prepare for the dance, alongside footage of their daughters’ lives as they deal with the absence of their parent.

The film looks to the future, not the past. Rather than dwell on the reasons the fathers landed in prison, Daughters shows their efforts to connect with their children, and focuses on the effects of the transformational offer to do so. It gives the viewer space to challenge their ideas about incarceration and the effectiveness of a punitive system that often neglects the rehabilitative and emotional needs of both prisoners and their families.

In its final act, Daughters reflects on the longer-term impact of the dance, tracking the families’ lives over the next few years. The results are mixed, ranging from hopeful to deeply sorrowful, prompting a critical examination of whether the current system serves justice or merely perpetuates suffering.

WHERE TO WATCH- You can watch the series on Netflix or watch the trailer (runtime: 2:47).

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