Crime is a part of life that we as cityfolk normalise but it always hits different when it’s closer. This is especially true for American girls and women who have to experience school shootings and broken families. Diamond Stewart and her daughter Santana watch news about school shootings, experiencing that news within their context, their ‘new normal’. Santana is just one of many girls whose father is under incarceration, both groups living with severed bonds. To repair that separation, their community organised Date with Dad, a father daughter dance for girls with fathers under incarceration. Ranging from five to 15 years old, the titular subjects in Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s Daughters feel unique limitations concerning their dads’ incarceration.

Daughters is straightforward, showing the men in group therapy sessions as well as spontaneous interviews of their daughters. One of those daughters is Raziah Lewis, telling the camera that ten minute calls with her father Alonzo isn’t enough. Most people understand how crime and punishment works, laws designing punishment ideally for the individual who commits outside harm. But this documentary shows that laws punish innocent children just because of things that their fathers allegedly did. Incarceration take s mental toll on families, like Ja’Ana Crudup having suicidal ideation because her father, Frank Walker, is in jail.

My experience with documentaries about incarceration are few and far between, but this one has a personal scope. There’s no mention of what the men did to end up under incarceration which successfully humanises them and their family members. The focus on the titular subjects in Daughters also shows its approach in observing these girls as they reunite with their fathers. Nine weeks of the therapy program pass by just in time for the girls to arrive at the facility. The other girls vocalise their anxieties about meeting their fathers again but Santana’s silent, feeling what others feel as she anticipates a reunion with her father, Mark Grimes.

The bus ride and the dance itself takes up a chunk of the running time of Daughters. From this point on, the documentary’s cinematography makes it feel like we’re watching regular home videos of a community coming together. Before the dance, the fathers joke about how they need to teach their daughters the right dance moves. Fast forward to the dance when they’re dancing as awkwardly as their daughters, giving this documentary some necessary levity. This feels like the kind of cookouts I see on social media but songs mean more to everyone.

The fathers and the daughters have a good time but Daughters snaps its viewers back to grim realities. Sometimes we don’t see the fathers but hear them over the phone, like Keith Swepston talking to his daughter Aubrey Smith. She seems aloof towards him at first but after the conversation she, still distant, talks about wanting him home. Closing intertitles reveal that the Dance with Dad program has a low recidivism rate, helping 95% of the incarcerated fathers. All but one of the four main fathers here, though, stay under incarceration, reminding us of prison impacting families.

Stars like Kerry Washington serve as executive producers for Daughters. After its theatrical run at the TIFF Lightbox, it’s also available to stream on Netflx.