Kent and Wonder discuss the documentary Daughters, which follows four young girls as they prepare for a special father daughter dance with their incarcerated fathers. Themes that emerged were exile and punishment, loss of innocence, fatherhood and injury to it, and what it takes to repair. Astrologically these themes relate to the 4th and 12th houses, Saturn, and the asteroid Chiron.
Distribution: Streaming on Netflix
Directors: Angela Patton & Natalie Rae
Run Time: 96 minutes
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.462] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we're breaking down the archetypal dynamics of stories. Specifically this season, we're looking at Sundance 2024, where we're unpacking 36 different documentaries. And this is the third out of five of our section on Deconstructing Dominant Structures of Power. So today's episode, we're going to be diving deep into a piece called Daughters, which is a part of the U.S. documentary competition and actually won two awards. It won the Audience Award for U.S. documentary, and it also won the Festival Favorite Award, which means that of all the films at Sundance, it was the highest rated in terms of the audience reaction and actually got picked up by Netflix. So it will be available at some point. And it was directed by Angela Patton and Natalie Ray. So Wonder, wondering if you could read the synopsis of Daughters.
[00:01:04.648] Wonder Bright: I would be happy to. Daughters. Four young girls prepare for a special daddy-daughter dance with their incarcerated fathers as part of a unique fatherhood program in a Washington, D.C. jail. A moving lesson in empathy and forgiveness, Daughters is a result of an eight-year documentary journey that filmmaker Natalie Ray and Angela Patton, an activist advocating for, quote, “at-promise girls”, embarked upon. As Aubrey, Santana, Raziah, and Ja’Ana get ready for the special event, they speak candidly about their hopes, dreams, and disappointments. There is an innate wisdom and honesty to what they share about their dad's inconsistent presence, an awareness far beyond their years. Daughters meaningfully challenges many stereotypes around incarceration and serves as a poignant reminder that maintaining family bonds can be both healing and empowering. We get to witness a lot of joy, but in keeping with the film's vérité style, Ray and Patton don't shy away from more challenging moments, including heartbreak, skepticism, reluctance to engage and anger. But then comes a classic dad joke and the mood shifts again. And that expert synopsis was written by Sundance programmer Ania Trzebiatowska.
[00:02:27.802] Kent Bye: Ooh, yeah, just even thinking about this film brings tears to my eyes. I feel like this is one of the films where I was just, like, crying so much through the entirety of this film. I think because it's really looking at the exile nature of what it means to go to prison and how much of that larger context of the criminal justice system is a hugely racist entity that is bringing undue harm for people of color, black population. And so you see how this has really broken apart families, and this is, like, a little moment of refuge where they're able to bring this dance into the prison. It started from a request from one of the daughters who had asked the sheriff of a town in Virginia whether or not they could go into a prison and have a dance with their fathers.
[00:03:26.413] Wonder Bright: I think it wasn't just one daughter. It was many daughters who were already working with Angela Patton. And she said, well, let's ask them. So a young girl asked Angela Patton if they could do that. And then Angela Patton forwarded all of the girl's request to the sheriff.
[00:03:44.368] Kent Bye: Yeah, and miraculously he agreed and it has been, like, a whole movement really, of a whole program to teach the fathers what it means to be a father, and so there’s, like, these weekly meetings they get to talk about their feelings and then that's kind of all building up to this dance that happens in the context of the prison that is just... it's just so moving and heart-wrenching at the same time. It’s, like this bittersweet moment of refuge where you see the families reconnecting but also being taken apart at the end. But it gives this moment of aspiration and hope for the people in prison to get their act together and really do what they need to do to get out and be a part of the family and to really show up for their daughters again. Yeah, just such an incredible film. Like I said, it won the festival favorite award, which is high praise, meaning that lots of audiences were deeply moved by this piece.
[00:04:42.665] Wonder Bright: It's interesting because the film is called Daughters and really so much of the story is actually about the fathers. It's about their journey of revelation and reckoning with where they find themselves at, and how they got there, and how they're on the precipice of recreating the same harm that was caused them in their families for their descendants. And it's so clearly, I think, as you've really spoken to about how this is happening to these men as a result of an unjust system. And the reason it's called Daughters is because we come to understand that through framing the story of these fathers through the eyes of their daughters. So we understand that the people who are being punished the most in many ways are not the fathers, but their daughters, who are not only being deprived of their father, but they're being deprived of a familial and intimate connection with the very man who is most likely to teach them how to choose a partner and create their own family. So their experience of that significant person is marked by the removal and the inability to actually be with that person. And there's so much around the way that the criminal justice system is currently produced in our country that has it such that these men are there as a result of their own actions. Full stop. End of story. And these little girls then are trying to figure out why their father's not there in a meaningful way, in a way that they can understand. You know, like, the youngest child is six when we first meet her. And oh my gosh, that kiddo. I'm just gonna start crying all over again. Like, we started, you were right, we started crying not even five minutes into this film. And it just keeps coming in waves. And part of it is because it's so heartbreaking. But part of it is because these children are still children. So they still have that capacity for belief. You just cannot deny their innocence and their desire for something good and something real, and their willing acceptance of it when it comes, no matter how fleeting. There's just something about the way that child mind accepts its current circumstances, and surrenders to an emotional response to it really fully, that just makes the humanity of these men and the people who are facilitating this project so crystal clear. It's just an extraordinary film and I think one of the reasons why we responded to it so strongly, why the audience award was given to it, why everyone responds to it so strongly, I think we can find a clue for that in what we talked about in our first episode in this section, which was for the film Power. And we were talking about how It's very easy when we identify a problem to want to jump immediately to a solution. And it's really important to really understand the problem. And something that this film offers us is an identification of a big problem. And then they are actually solving it. And when I say solving it, I don't mean everything's tied up in a neat little bow. However, they are giving us stories of people who are finding their way through a completely impossible quagmire that has its roots in a system of injustice that has been going on for centuries. And yet they are finding their way through it, and they are finding their way towards one another, and they are creating an opportunity for healing that is completely inspiring. And it made me, like, I felt hopeful at the end of this film, despite the fact that it was identifying a really, really big problem. I still felt hopeful.
[00:09:40.543] Kent Bye: Yeah, this is one of the films that when we got to the Q&A section, we were really looking forward to getting some updates because the film itself is produced over a course of eight years or so. And so you see the evolution of these daughters evolve over time. More so in the first part, they give only brief updates at the end, but you see this larger trajectory. But one of the women that was involved in helping to bring this to Washington, D.C. and that prison has since left that prison is now working full time on prison reform. I think in part because, first of all, there needs to be a lot of reform for the prisons. And I think that you see the impact of some of the decisions that have been made. One of which was that it used to be a lot easier for many prisons to have what they call touch visits where you can actually be in the same physical location with the fathers, with the family. And that mentioned in the Q&A that because of the perceived threat of contraband entering in through these families, they basically shut down all the touch visits and it's basically transformed into this hellscape of a capitalist system where in order to communicate, it has to be through paid minutes, you have to do it remotely through a video call. But the woman who was at the prison said during the Q&A, it's like COVID showed that like even despite shutting down all visits altogether, contraband was still coming into the prison. So the main excuse for why a lot of these family visits were eradicated is not founded because there's still mechanisms for how contraband is entering in through the prison
[00:11:13.709] Wonder Bright: But what do you want to bet that was just an excuse? You know, like the mechanization of having things be automated, and you're not having to have X amount of guards in a room, making sure that there's no physical contact at the tables, that there's yada yada, you know what I mean? Like, I would be willing to bet that a lot of the reason prison systems in this country have gone to that method are because it was a cost effective measure for them. And then on top of that, they can make money off of these people who are not being paid very much money, by the way, to work for Victoria's Secret or whoever is, like, capitalizing on prison labor. They're having to spend whatever money they're making on phone calls and on these virtual visits instead of, like, just I don't know, maybe a human experience of being able to stay in contact with their family and loved ones. I'm so angry.
[00:12:08.176] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think this, this film shows the impact of that over time. And, you know, it's not really a critique over the criminal justice system that's just happening in the context of that. It's like the aftermath of everything. But you see the impact of that exile, what I think of like the 12th House as a signification that's often associated with imprisonment and exile and the cutting off of contact. And so this experience of these prisoners is this exile in the way that the cutting off of the family is going into another level of that exile because you see the impact of these kids on their phones and their tablets as they're trying to have a conversation. It's just voice a lot of times. And it's a lot different than if they're able to actually visit and be with their father. So yeah, I'd love to hear some of your significations that you're really seeing at the course of this film of daughters.
[00:13:04.728] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I mean it's very much a 12th House film. I think it's primarily a 4th House film because, for me, it was really about fatherhood, and what fatherhood means through the eyes of the daughters, and through the eyes of this next generation who are going to then go out and choose men to try to be intimate with when they haven't had an experience of real intimacy from a father figure who loved them, and protected them, and held them, and taught them to treat their bodies with respect and regard, because that man was just gone, was ripped apart from them, was stolen. So for me, it's very much a 4th House expression of home, land and parents. And those are Demetra's keywords. But 4th House traditionally has to do with father. And it's sort of like the root of the chart. Now, obviously, if you're talking about a gay and lesbian family, it becomes more complicated. Like what is fatherhood when you have two fathers? How do you choose those things? And, you know, in today's modern world, where we've got a lot of single parents, or we have two moms, or we have non-binary families and all kinds of things, you know, these are open questions that we all have about what that signature might mean. But to answer that question, you really can look at, like, what's the underlying meaning of the 4th House? What's the underlying meaning of the imum coeli, which is the angle which marks the 4th House? And it has to do with being the root of the structure. So if the ascendant is your identity, and that's the face that you put into the world, the 4th House is the root of the matter. It's where you come from, it's your origins. And so there's this place traditionally where it was thought that the father was the root or the origin of the family in that way. And obviously that's a patriarchal version of reality, but we live in a patriarchal structure of reality. So it works a lot of times. It doesn't mean that it has to be the dad, but where is the root of the family? And what happens when those roots are pulled up and the child becomes rootless? So this is a film for me, which has to do with that, with being able to identify your root. with being able to enfold yourself in the arms of the person who roots you to this earth and being able to know that you're safe in the world because you were made safe from the start. And these little girls are not being made safe. But we can take a lot of heart from the fact that these filmmakers have been able to reflect that and to encourage the fathers to think that they can repair those relationships and find a way to be the root, even though they themselves, because we have historically been depriving black and brown people from their roots in this culture, that they themselves can find it, although it was not provided for them. And in finding it for themselves, they can provide it for their own children.
[00:16:24.443] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah. And isn't father another signification of Saturn as well?
[00:16:29.440] Wonder Bright: Yeah, Saturn has signifiers of fatherhood. In modern texts, I believe Sun does as well. But again, it's sort of like, you know, these are open questions. How do we think about who is the parent that shines the light? Who is the parent that provides the structure if it's Saturn versus the Sun?
[00:16:50.743] Kent Bye: Yeah, because I had really focused in on the 12th House as a context because this is happening in the context of a prison. But also Saturn is the joy of the 12th House, the 12th House being originally the bad spirit and with Saturn there and its joy, then there's a sympathy between the significations of the 12th House and all the significations of Saturn. This is a section where we're talking about deconstructing power structures. And I think each of these stories have deep themes connected to the Saturn-Pluto complex of a lot of the power structures of domination, capitalism, racism, sexism, all those things all the way down that are in this Saturn-Pluto complex that we're seeing in these stories. But I wanted to read this section from Demetra George's Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice, the second volume, where she's going into each of the different 12th House significations. And again, with Saturn having its joy there, she says, “Saturn is also known as the basis for the significations of imprisonment, confinement located in this sector of the 12th House. Mythical Kronos was cast into Tartarus, a realm under Hades, where he was imprisoned after losing the war against the Olympians. In Rome, the cold statue of Saturn had its feet bound with rope during most of the year, symbolizing his constriction. However, during the five-day period of this intercalary festival of Saturnalia, his bonds were loosened, the restraints lifted, and slaves and masters exchanged places. Here we see how prisons, bondage, reformatories, concentration camps, and escape from such institutions all fall in the 12th's domain, together with banishment, exile, and persecution”. So, you know, the Egyptian calendar had 360 days and there was a five-day period of this intercalary period where that's how long it actually takes the earth to go around the sun. And it's during this intercalary period where they'd have the Saturnalia, where basically everything flips on its head. And so in some ways, this film is like a Saturnalia expression because everybody's in prison, but basically fathers get to have this dance, which is much more of like a 5th House expression where they're able to really celebrate and be with their daughters in a way that is a little bit of a moment out of time, just like the Saturnalia rituals of the past were. In the zodiacal releasing technique it's the loosening from the bonds, is what they call it, which is basically this moment after you go through the full cycle of all the different signs and all the different planetary periods, and then it's that moment that flips on its head and you have this complete pole reversal. And it's kind of like a Uranian polarity shift where there's things that are made possible that are not before possible. So this whole film is giving this kind of Saturnalia ritual where they're having the daughters come in and they're able to celebrate and dance and a lot more of these kind of leisure things that we might associate with the 5th House. So we're kind of, like, transforming the 12th House expression into a 5th House expression, but through the vehicle of the 4th House of the father and the 5th House of children are also coming together. So for me, those are some of the big significations that are coming up.
[00:20:03.496] Wonder Bright: Yeah. It's so funny to me how you have so many things that come up and I often just have one and maybe two. (laughs) Pop quiz, people. Which one of us has a lot of mutable Gemini stuff? And which one of us is all Saturn all the time? Kent Bye: Wonder is the Saturn, I'm the Jupiter gem. Wonder Bright: Yeah, there's so much joy in this film. There's so much joy. And it's perhaps thrown into such relief because it's so hard to get to or it feels like it's so shrouded or so impossible. So it's like coming out of a dark movie theater and realizing it's still daylight outside. It feels really, really bright. Such a beautiful film.
[00:21:06.229] Kent Bye: Yeah, a couple more significations that are out there. There's a lot of Venetian beauty that is a part of this ritual as well, because the daughters get all dressed up, they're all made up, and the fathers have an opportunity to get out of their orange jumpsuits and actually put on a suit and just really dress up for the occasion. Also, leading up to the dance, just a really incredible therapeutic context where the fathers get to get counseled and go through this group experience of really reflecting about their own experiences of fatherhood, their own experiences of being a father, their wounds, their traumas, a lot of this deepening into the Chiron wounds, so their deepest wounds that they've had and how they want to transmute those wounds and have the Chiron expression of the wounded healer of being able to come back from that. And then the other thing I just wanted to throw out there is that there's a lot of dynamics of the mothers and wives that are a part of this who are on the front lines of taking care of the daughters while the fathers are in prison. And they also have a role to play of even allowing this to happen in the first place. or a sort of a historical impact of the mothers deciding to cut off the contact of their daughters with the fathers. And so this is, again, an opportunity to have the Saturnalia moment where all these rules that may have been bounding everybody's behaviors have an opportunity to shift and change and really focus on that 4th House expression. So I guess if you were to think about Daughters as a film, who would you prescribe this to?
[00:22:43.365] Wonder Bright: I would prescribe this for anyone who has a father-daughter wound. So like a lot of people, I would prescribe this for a lot of people. I would prescribe this for people who want to understand how vital the 4th House is and what happens when our root structure is imperiled and what it might take to repair it.
[00:23:14.895] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as I want to bear witness to this film, I really want to highlight Angela Patton, who's a co-director, but she's also the founder of this whole dance, and I think it's really transformed into a movement. And also her collaborator, who is the counselor for the men, I think his name was Chad. Wonder Bright: Yeah, they call him Life Coach Chad. Kent Bye: Life Coach Chad, yeah. So he did an incredible job of just helping to shepherd these fathers, prepare them, and to facilitate a context for them to really be emotionally vulnerable in a way that they really don't have much opportunity to have. But I think that was, for me, just some of the most powerful moments of seeing Chad really preparing them and providing this context for them to go there. And of course, all of the mothers who were also like, holding the fort down and then the fathers who have this opportunity to really make a shift. And you can really see how transformative of a moment this is for not only for the daughters, but also for the fathers to really reinvigorate them and to give them a new motivation and inspiration to make some changes. Sometimes they're able to make those changes and come out and change their lives. And other times the fates are against them, meaning they're going to be in prison for a really, really long time. And they're not going to have that same opportunity to really be there for their daughters when they're young. So another heartbreaking, bittersweet, tragic aspect to this film, but I think it really speaks to the power of storytelling and how this as a story may actually bring about some policy changes around the country. I certainly hope so.
[00:25:00.225] Wonder Bright: At the very least that it might bring forth more people doing this work, that’s extraordinary. Yeah. And I also just want to touch on the humility that Coach Chad embodies in the way that he coaches these men. He's really at pains in the film, and then also in the Q&A after, to say that I'm not a therapist, I'm going through this too. This is also my journey towards fatherhood and trying to understand how to be a father. Because I think that humility is the thing that is going to be required for real change in this country. And I think both Angela and Chad bring that humility to this cause and to these kids, and to the mothers, and to the fathers. And it is humbling. This path of recovery is necessarily humbling, because we typically start to protect ourselves with stories about why things aren't the way that we might want them. And we watch these little girls go through that process. We watch them go from this wide-eyed innocence and hope that they might have a relationship with their father who they just adore, to this kind of, like, distance and cynicism, you know, when they're really young, you know, as young as nine. And I remember having my own form of cynicism and that it started forming at that age and to watch a wide-eyed, innocent, young creature experience that cynicism, to watch it happening to them the way it just takes over their body - it fills me with despair and it is this experience of humility that Chad and Angela are able to embody as they work with these people, as they engage with the people in the film, that you see trust emerge and real repair occur. So I think, maybe that's the main thing that I'd like to bear witness to is the humility that it takes to go through this kind of recovery, of self-recovery and repairing one's roots.
[00:27:30.427] Kent Bye: Yeah, such a powerful healing film. I'm so glad that it not only won the Audience Award for U.S. Documentary, but also the Festival Favorite Award, which I think really speaks to the power of how moving the story is and that Netflix picked it up. And so this is one of the films that will be made widely available. So definitely keep an eye on websites like justwatch.com and search for Daughters and just to see what the release date ends up being. You can either Google Daughters Netflix release date just to get more information where you can have a chance to watch this film. If you're listening to this, hopefully you've already watched it. But yeah, thanks again for joining us here on the story all the way down podcast. If you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider signing up for our newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
