00:00 It's so clear that fathers need their daughters and that daughters need their fathers and
00:04 that we need to be able to be in community and not stuck behind plexiglass or monitors
00:11 and electronic devices.
00:14 We need to be in community.
00:16 The fact that you can't touch your child is just, it's inhumane.
00:23 I was asked to do a TED Talk about the father-daughter dance in the jail.
00:27 I had many filmmakers reach out to me after the TED Talk and said they thought that this
00:32 would be a great story to tell to the world.
00:36 I did as well, but I had other storytellers.
00:42 Sometimes the local news, a journalist would come in and I wasn't always satisfied with
00:48 the story because they would leave out one key point and that was the girls.
00:54 The girls who actually came up with an idea to connect with their fathers on their own
00:59 terms.
01:01 When Natalie reached out to me, she got it.
01:04 She understood that the girls need to be at the forefront and also invited me to be a
01:09 co-director because she understood that representation mattered.
01:14 She understood that I knew the families and so together we were able to bring our strengths,
01:19 our talents, our community has also been supportive of making this into the doc that we have today.
01:26 It happened organically, but throughout the process we also broke down the boundaries
01:32 of a typical doc together.
01:34 When I saw Angela's TED Talk, it just was such a powerful story and I've worked a lot
01:38 in the women's space and it was just one of the most powerful examples of what could happen
01:43 when we listen to young women's ideas.
01:47 We met, we really saw very similar.
01:49 We've got similar tastes in music and visuals and all those kind of things.
01:52 We just love the same stuff and we also knew the power of the music and the dance and the
01:57 touch and these elements that we really wanted to bring out as threads in the film.
02:02 Each year the film needs something different.
02:04 Honestly, we thought it might only take two or three years, but we actually took three
02:08 years to get a dance filmed because the program went on hold.
02:13 Things happened so then we finally got a dance filmed in 2019.
02:16 Then there's a pandemic, there's all these other obstacles, funding, so we just always
02:20 have each other's backs and I think can wear many hats together.
02:24 It's been great, great collaboration.
02:26 What was your favorite part about the process of being in the documentary?
02:29 It would probably be the father daughter dance because that's the time I got to see my dad
02:34 the most and we had lots of fun.
02:38 That's probably the best memory I've had in my whole life.
02:41 Learning more and more as the film went on, I think even before COVID, hundreds of facilities
02:46 were stopping in person visitation rooms and even stopping the visits on either side of
02:53 a glass wall and replacing that with video apps, video visits or letting tech companies
03:00 come in and actually charge families.
03:02 It could be like $7 a text message, $15 for a video visit.
03:07 The prices are insane and then they make this experience so dehumanizing and end up causing
03:15 more damage and a lot of the girls that we've spoken to have just said they don't even want
03:20 to do these visits and stuff like that.
03:24 It's really important for people to see what it's doing on that side and understand the
03:28 cost both financially and just what it does to people's lives.
03:32 I went to this very elite, fancy private school for high school and at our school we had a
03:39 father daughter dance and I always saw that as something that more privileged communities
03:43 do.
03:44 I never unpacked why that is.
03:47 Why would that be?
03:48 To hear about this really special tradition that's so important in the maintenance of
03:54 a bond between a father and daughter being taken into a space where people are so dehumanized,
04:00 I thought this is a really powerful idea and I immediately wanted to watch it and learn
04:05 more about it.
04:06 What was it like watching the footage of the documentary and seeing it all together?
04:12 What is that like?
04:13 Just to see the part throughout the documentary where we sitting down, because we was incarcerated
04:23 at the time so we had our suits and ties on and we was all lined up and our daughters
04:29 came from down the hallway in a line.
04:34 Just to see that from the outside looking in, it was just, like I said, it was life
04:39 changing.
04:40 Then fast forward to when we had to let reality really kick in when our daughters had to leave
04:48 us and people cried, daughters cried.
04:54 Some daughters didn't understand, "Why he not coming with us?"
04:58 They didn't really understand.
04:59 If our message get out there, I think that it'll change a lot of people's lives because
05:05 even if you're not a parent, you're still somebody's child.
05:08 I just want to shout out these two over here because you guys are community organizers.
05:14 You transform.
05:15 You're in the community every day in Richmond, Virginia.
05:18 You have been for years, before the film, after the film.
05:21 I think part of what we want people to understand is that when you watch the movie, if you want
05:26 there to be change, you don't actually have to reinvent the wheel.
05:29 There are people dedicated to transforming communities and making the world a better
05:32 place and they are doing this heavy lifting every single day.
05:36 Those who watch the film, who don't participate in conversations or read press or hear from
05:40 Angela won't know that it really started with the power of voice and for our youth voice,
05:46 our daughters in particularly, but also for me as an advocate for fathers being accountable,
05:53 putting them in a position to have conversations among themselves and then being challenged
05:58 enough to find a plate to step up to not only to advocate and be present for your child
06:04 as best you can, but be willing to take the charge of carrying the shield of, "Hey, I
06:10 was transparent in this space and you can see a glimpse into my life."
06:14 Because the men that are behind the wall don't have advocates.
06:18 They're classified by number or they're classified by statistic or they're classified by public
06:23 opinion about what it is they've done, classified by crime, classified by conviction, but their
06:29 voice being heard brings it back to the human story.
06:32 This story is being driven by real people in real lives and the work that we do particularly
06:36 is about that.
06:37 So I'm really hopeful that the conversations continue.
06:40 When we tell this story, this happened because a young girl had an idea and these girls wrote
06:45 a letter to their sheriff.
06:47 In a lot of communities, you vote for your sheriff.
06:50 You don't talk about all the down ballot elections that happen, judges, sheriffs, school boards,
06:57 but you have to show up not just to vote for the big elections, the governors, the presidents,
07:01 the senators.
07:02 Those are important, but also that sheriff had the open heart to say, "Let's try to make
07:07 this work.
07:08 Let's see if we can make this work.
07:09 I don't know how it's going to work, but this sounds like a great idea."
07:13 We have to elect people in positions of power that are willing to be led by their community,
07:18 that know that their salaries are paid by our tax dollars, that we don't work for them,
07:22 they work for us.
07:23 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Comments