New Netflix film has a 100% perfect Rotten Tomatoes score

Ready for an emotional punch? Daughters is shaping up to be Netflix’s low-key must-watch piece of content of the week.

Daughters is a documentary about fathers who end up in jail, and how it affects the relationship they have with their daughters.

“My daughter was born when I was in prison. I had to see her through glass. Couldn’t kiss her, couldn’t hurt her,” says one of the men featured in the documentary.

Netflix acquired the rights to the film in January 2024, after its debut at the Sundance film festival. It won two awards at that festival: best US documentary and the “festival favourite” award.

In case you need more proof it’s worth a watch, Daughters also has a rare 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating (from 44 critic reviews) and an impressive 84% review average at Metacritic.

This is a one-off feature-length documentary with a runtime of 107 minutes, but may see you shed a tear more than once - as the trailer proves.

“Lensed with love yet unabashedly committed to its nuanced depiction of familial strain—as well as the social systems that beget this separation—Daughters is a testament to the power of a father’s love and support, no matter the obstacle,” says Paste Magazine’s 9/10 review.

“It’s a tender, painful, intimate film, made over several years as we watch four girls in the months before the dance,” says The Guardian’s 4-star review.

That dance is an event held in the Washington jail of the documentary, where the imprisoned fathers dress up smart and their daughters come for a father-daughter dance.

While Daughters got its debut screenings in January, the film was also given a limited cinematic release in a handful of cinemas in August 2024.

The documentary is co-directed by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, who is also CEO of Girls For A Change, a nonprofit whose aim in "empowering self-identifying Black girls in Central Virginia."

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