Having the patience

There are always going to be a lot of unknowns when you make a documentary. I suppose it's kind of like writing a news story, if you're a journalist. You never know what somebody is going to say, what's going to happen, and whether either of those things takes you down a new avenue in how you tell the story.

However, if you are making a movie about a well-meaning program like the Dates With Dad program -- in which incarcerated men are permitted a whole evening at a dance with their daughters, despite their prisons otherwise restricting physical contact with loved ones -- it's easy to imagine how you might envision it playing out. 

You profile a couple inmates on the inside, and you profile their daughters, and likely the mothers of those daughters, on the outside. You show the events leading up to this dance, and the emotional crescendo of the movie is the dance itself, when the separated family members are finally reunited -- and then, almost cruelly enough that you wonder if it was even worth it, torn apart again three hours later. 

I mean, of course it was worth it, just for the intense cathartic emotions of the experience. In the Netflix documentary Daughters, the prison-side counsellor, who is liaising with these men, tells them it will be an emotional rollercoaster, and boy is it that. But probably much better to experience both the highs and the lows than the flat-line monotony of prison life. 

But that dance would make a pretty good climax, wouldn't it? Of course it would, easy peasy.

Angela Patton and Natalie Rae are not content with that. They know there's more to this story.

In a decision that required a lot of patience, the directors of Daughters waited not only one year after the dance, to see where everyone was, but a whole three years -- knowing that their best material might be how much this single event, with its increased emotional intensity and the promises of a better future contained within, would actually impact the lives of the people they profiled. 

There would be pressure -- if not from themselves internally, then from financiers -- to just put a bow on this documentary and release it with the indisputably good footage they already had. It could have easily made a complete movie, and we wouldn't have been any the wiser that there was more to see.

But they didn't, and they were right. 

I won't say what occurs in these final 20 minutes of Daughters, I'll just say it is an infinitely more complex portrait as a result of it. And quite likely the best documentary of the year.