A “father wound” occurs when the father is absent from a child’s life, leading to severe mental health problems. For the daughters in the documentary by filmmaker Natalie Rae and activist Angela Patton, their incarcerated fathers were absent for several years to decades.

Patton’s revolutionary Date with Dad program aims to bridge that gap by reuniting daughters with their fathers in a rare one-day dance event to help them connect and bond in person.

The importance and gravity of this situation cannot be underestimated. Since 2014, hundreds of US prisons have stopped offering free in-person visits. Instead, they charge families for video visits.

For many of the fathers and daughters in the documentary, the dance is the only opportunity for a face-to-face meeting where they can physically touch and hug each other.

Shot over an eight-year period, the film centers on the first of these dances in Washington, DC. The film traces the lives of four families in the lead-up to and aftermath of this event, exploring issues of healing, forgiveness, connection and community.

Daughters is a tearjerker from the start. It’s impossible not to be emotionally devastated as you watch timid young girls (some as young as four or five) walk gingerly down a prison corridor to meet fathers, some of whom have only seen them through a pane of glass or on a screen. The reunions are both heartbreaking and joyful.

The dance takes place in the middle of the film, splitting the film in two. We meet the families and witness the fathers begin a 10-week program to strengthen their fatherhood skills in the lead up to the dance. We then travel years into the future to see the lasting impact of that day on each of the families and how the experience of incarceration continues to shape their lives.

Each of the four girls in Daughters reacts to their father’s absence in completely different ways. Five-year-old Aubrey is bright and precocious, obsessed with her school schedule because it lets her measure how long it will take for her father, Keith, to be released. Ten-year-old Santana is bitter about having to act as a surrogate mother to her two younger siblings and vows never to be a mother herself. Quiet and thoughtful eleven-year-old Ja’Ana remembers nothing about her father – not even his face. Fifteen-year-old Raziah has difficult feelings about her father missing out on her childhood and struggles with suicidal thoughts.

Their mothers are there to support them. Although Daughters focuses on the relationship between fathers and daughters, the mothers are not supporting characters. The Date with Dad program empowers them to find community with other single mothers and recognize their shared strength and resilience. Mothers are recognized as the real reason their children lead safe and healthy lives, and often put their own needs aside to take on the role of two parents in difficult situations.

Clear-eyed but compassionate, “Daughters” never offers easy answers or clear solutions. Guilt and responsibility are never avoided, though it’s no coincidence that we never learn why the fathers are in prison. Rae and Patton aren’t interested in individual cases of wrongdoing. As a result, the audience only ever sees the men in their own light as they grapple with the role they played in breaking up their families, as well as general questions about how to be a good father and a good person.

What the documentary explores much more is the cyclical nature of intergenerational violence, trauma and poverty that has often landed these men in prison more than once. The risk of re-offending is high, many of their family members have been or still are incarcerated, and the conditions that led to their incarceration persist even after their release.

Everyone at Daughters is African American, including the inmates and their families, as well as the program’s support staff who rally around them like a community. And it doesn’t take long to see the cruel and callous inhumanity of a correctional system that disproportionately affects African Americans.

To make room for new inmates, prisoners are often transferred to prisons in other states, making it difficult for their families to visit them. The inability to meet in person not only punishes the inmates, but also tears apart families who will face the effects of this trauma for generations to come.

The brutality of the U.S. prison system—the dreary monochrome of the bare monolith buildings, the uniform orange of the inmates’ uniforms—is offset by Michael Cambio Fernandez’s beautiful camerawork and carefully observed moments.

Grainy, slow-motion video footage of a languid childhood in nature sits alongside beautiful scenes of girlhood and sisterhood outside of prison and striking scenes of kinship and camaraderie inside.

In a telling tracking shot of the piles of discarded belts, ties and shoes after the dance, Fernandez simultaneously shows the sense of dignity the imprisoned men gained when they exchanged their state-issued clothing for formal wear, and how quickly it was taken away from them.

On a systemic level, Date with Dad has been a tremendous success. 95 percent of the fathers who have participated in the program have not gone back to prison. On a personal level, it is an important respite for the fathers and their families and a recognition of their humanity. As Santana’s father, Mark, says, “I wasn’t in prison for those six hours.”

“Daughters” is now streaming on Netflix.