WINNER—Audience Award, US Documentary, Sundance 2024; Festival Favourite, Sundance 2024; Knight Documentary Award, Miami Film Festival 2024

Winner of the Audience Award: US Documentary, at the Sundance Film Festival, Daughters follows young girls and their incarcerated fathers as they prepare for a special daddy-daughter dance in a Washington, DC, jail.

Part of Virginia’s groundbreaking Date with Dad project, the event is the culmination of a 12-week counselling program that assists inmates to foster successful relationships with their daughters both while they’re inside and after their release. Given the statewide decrease of in-person visitation and the increasing costs of video-communication, the dance will be the first moment of physical contact since incarceration for some of these parents and children.

Shot over the course of eight years, the film captures the weight of the complex emotions these girls and their dads must navigate, in both the lead-up to the big event and the ensuing separation. Intimate and honest, this heart-rending study uniquely reveals one of the most personal consequences of mass incarceration.