At a TED Talk in 2012, Angela Patton, the executive director of the nonprofit organization Girls for Change, told a story. She ran a summer program called Camp Diva in Richmond, Virginia. Patton asked the dozen or so participants if the camp could do anything to strengthen the bond between them and their fathers. The goal of the program was to teach empowerment to young women, and Patton knew that a healthy relationship between girls and their fathers was an important part of that. One suggested a dance. The event was so successful that Patton and her team decided to hold it annually.

When it came to planning the next year’s meet, one young woman lamented that her father was unable to attend. He was in prison at the time, and the thought of watching her fellow campers dance with their fathers was depressing. One of her fellow Divas wondered: What if we held the dance in prison? The question became a solution, and the first “Date With Dad” event was born. It was a huge success – so much so that nearly a decade later, a correctional facility in Washington DC decided to try the program as well.

Patton is also one of the documentary filmmakers behind daughters, with filmmaker Natalie Rae, and you can understand why they wanted to capture this for posterity. A winner of this year’s Sundance Film Festival and quickly snapped up by Netflix (where it’s now streaming), it offers the perfect opportunity to examine the effects of mass incarceration from a highly subjective point of view. Yet neither Patton nor Rae seem interested in preaching, campaigning, or simply making a Truth Infomercial version of this TED Talk. They are less concerned with documenting a sociological experiment from afar and more with capturing the experience – and need – for human connection up close and personal, with particular attention to the side of young women. It is said daughters, and not The dance or Father’s Day, for a specific reason.

Of course, equal time is paid to the men serving their sentences and the family members who had to cope with their absence. We get to attend the mandatory 10-week program, led by a “fatherhood life coach” named Chad, that the fathers attend to prepare for the event. We hear their stories of regret, sadness, shame, and anger at not being able to be there for their children. How they ended up in prison is not discussed. Their feelings about all of this, especially about their children, and their determination to make amends are discussed. Almost all of the participants express the question, “Why does my daughter have to pay for my mistakes too?” in one form or another.

But it is the young women of daughters, between 5 and 15, who viewers are most likely to meet first, and that’s the perspective Patton and Rae want you to focus on first and foremost. Aubrey is a precocious kindergarten student who boasts about being the smartest kid in her class and knowing her multiplication tables; when her daddy says he loves her, she says, her response will be, “I love you more.“Santana is upset that her father isn’t there to balance her mother’s mood swings. Ja’Ana is pictured dancing happily in the street with her friends, but when the subject of her father comes up, she becomes pensive. “I don’t remember his face. I don’t remember anything about him.” Raziah, a teenager, is old enough to feel the absence more strongly, noting that “it doesn’t feel like home” without him there.

The filmmakers spend the first third cutting back and forth between these young women and their fathers, with an occasional countdown subtitle letting people know how long it will be before these family members actually get back together. Finally, we get to the moment when the men, in suits and ties instead of the state-mandated overalls, wait nervously in the hallway for their dates to arrive for the big night. Daughters knows that the drama will be dramatic and emotions will run high. But that doesn’t prepare you for the scene where the kids run down the hall and into the arms of their dads. “Overwhelming” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Tissues won’t stem the flood of tears – on the screen or in your living room. Even the hardiest viewer will sink into a puddle.

The scenes of the dance pass quickly, as we imagine how the night itself went for those involved. Some daughters sulk, others are mad with joy from the start, others come in cold and suspicious before thawing out and enjoying the company of their fathers. We can briefly overhear snippets of conversation, and if there is a major complaint, daughters, it’s that we don’t spend nearly enough time witnessing the details of the actual dance, or experiencing the forgiveness and first step toward healing from hurt. That, and the film’s annoying tendency to bloat things with lyrical interludes of young women staring moodily at the skyline and/or doing things in slow motion. (Rae was primarily a music video director before this, which might explain why the film far too often does so well.) It’s a common misstep in documentaries to try to gloss over something stylistically when the subject matter itself is rich enough to hold our attention on its own.

If Patton and Rae had ended their film with the long goodbye at the end of the event, it might be misunderstood as equating the dance with the graduation: father and daughter had a magical night together, and every rift was magically healed. Wisely, they continue, devoting the final third to what happens next. Some fathers are paroled, fulfilling their promise to be there for their children on the outside. Others are moved to facilities even farther away from their families. The idea of ​​repeat visits becomes a pipe dream for many. In some cases, phone conversations are limited to the occasional 15 minutes. Time passes.

Here is Daughters forgoes the easy route and gets more philosophical and thematically broad: It’s about how incarceration affects more than just the person behind bars and who is usually on the receiving end of a harsh sentence. (It’s worth noting that every family we follow is black.) But again, this isn’t a lecture in moving pictures. Rather than tell you how it affects young women, Patton and Rae show you. And watching one of the interviewees go from a happy, boisterous, talkative kid to a slightly older, more distant and jaded teenager is heartbreaking. Yes, these fathers and daughters had a great evening together and the program deserves to be picked up nationally. What the documentary goes to great lengths to remind us, though, is that even when the music stops, the pain lingers.