If you subscribe to Netflix for its burgeoning list of award-winning film festival movies, then its newest addition Daughters should have you turning your head. This feature documentary has just been added to the streamer (on Wednesday, August 14) and we could be hearing a lot more about it in awards season.
Directed by music video director Natalie Rae and activist Angela Patton, Daughters is about four daughters of men incarcerated in a jail in Washington D.C. They have to figure out life without their fathers while also preparing for a 'Daddy Daughter Dance' being organized by the prison.
Like many of Netflix's best documentaries, Daughters wasn't made by the streamer. Instead the platform acquired distribution rights to it after it played at Sundance Film Festival in January 2024.
As movie fans will know, Sundance is one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, and Daughters was nominated for its Grand Jury Prize and also won the Audience Award for US Documentary and Festival Favorite Award, beating out some impressive competition.
Being selected for the documentary audience award has put Daughters in with some impressive peers. Navalny from 2022 and Summer of Soul from 2021 both won the same award and went on to also bag the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, while 2020's Crip Camp was nominated for it and 2023's Beyond Utopia was shortlisted.
So there's a long track record of this award's winners going on to be in contention for the prestigious documentary Academy Award, and Daughters' winning of it suggests it too could be a movie to bear in mind for awards in a couple of months.
Whether or not Daughters goes on to win awards isn't quite important, though, because either way the movie looks set to address some important themes with its story. It'll tackle topics of race, gender and the American prison industry though the eyes of its four young subjects.
If you're in the mood for other fantastic documentaries on Netflix, the streamer also recently added a climbing movie that I said deserves Oscar attention, and we also have a round-up of the best movies on Netflix which includes lots of documentaries.
