DADDY DON’T GO follows four fathers as they attempt to raise their children without their mothers
DADDY DON’T GO (Emily Abt, 2015)
Saturday, November 14, SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves., 9:45
Tuesday, November 17, Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas, 260 West 23rd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves., 4:45
Festival runs November 12-19
www.docnyc.net
www.daddydontgothemovie.com
In Daddy Don’t Go, making its world premiere this week at DOC NYC, director and producer Emily Abt takes a unique look at single-parent households, focusing on four New York men attempting to raise their children without their mothers. “Being the product of a fatherless household, Daddy Don’t Go delves into an issue that’s close to my heart,” executive producer Omar Epps explains on the film’s Kickstarter page. “The media inundates us with the notion that men from impoverished areas are absent fathers but meanwhile there are millions of men fighting to be active in their children’s lives.” Daddy Don’t Go follows four such men as they battle the odds to succeed. Nelson AKA “Macho” Serrano is a former Latin King from the South Bronx, living with Rebecca, who has two kids from different fathers and now a third with the twenty-six-year-old Nelson, himself a product of the foster-care system whose mother was a coke addict and who has never met his father. “I’m my own father now,” he says. Omar Kennedy, a thirty-four-year-old father of three, is on disability in the North Bronx, trying to raise his kids without their mothers; one mother physically abused her two children with Kennedy, while the mother of his other child is in prison. One of his daughters, Milagros, suffers from a severe mental disorder that occasionally requires extended hospitalization. “As much as I’ve been trying to hold everything together, it’s like it’s slipping away from me,” he notes. Roy Puntervold is a twenty-eight-year-old Long Island man with a young son, Caiden, whose mother is still a party girl, unable to fulfill her duties as a parent, so he is raising the boy with his own mother and father while attending Forestdale’s Fathering Initiative so he can become a better dad. He is having difficulty finding a job because of a jail stint when he was a troubled teenager. “Not everything’s always what it seems,” he says, pointing out how hard it is, even with the support he’s getting from his folks. And twenty-six-year-old Alexander Charles Jr. is fighting the system as he takes classes to become an automotive technician while raising his young child in Harlem; the boy’s mother was declared unfit to be a parent. “I told myself, I’m not going to be no deadbeat father,” he says. “For me to be a deadbeat father, I gotta be dead, and somebody gotta beat me up for me to be a deadbeat. I’m not letting that happen.”
Abt (Take It from Me, All of Us) spent two years following the men’s heartbreaking stories, interspersing illuminating facts (“1 in 3 American children grow up without their father,” “There are over 1.1 million incarcerated fathers in the U.S.”) while casting no judgments, even when the men veer off track, making bad decisions that can have serious consequences. The men give Abt and codirector, coproducer, and cinematographer Andrew Nam Chul Osborne remarkable access to their lives, holding nothing back as they pursue their goal of succeeding as single parents, dedicating themselves to their kids no matter how tough things get. And while things get mighty tough, the men avoid blaming the system or society, doing just about whatever they can to try to make things right. Daddy Don’t Go is a powerful, emotional film, one that you won’t soon forget. It’s screening on November 14 at the SVA Theatre and November 17 at Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas, with both shows followed by Q&As with Abt, executive producers Epps, Jennifer Fox, and Malik Yoba, and the film’s subjects. DOC NYC runs November 12-19, opening with the U.S. premiere of Barbara Kopple’s Miss Sharon Jones! and continuing with more than two hundred films and special events, including new and classic documentaries, master classes, panel discussions, and a keynote conversation with Jon Alpert and Sheila Nevins.