From Purity Balls to Poverty to Teen Pregnancy, Film Puts a Face on the Sex Ed Debate

Daddy, I Do is unlike any documentary I’ve ever seen. It’s a linear narrative with no formal narration. That function is carried by people: real, honest-to-goodness, interesting, alive, sometimes sympathetic, other times maddening people, talking about their beliefs (secular and religious) who, through  excellent editing which is vitally careful of preserving the honesty of this documentary project, all together tell a story that is of our contemporary time and concern told in today’s idiom.

The statistics are there. They’re conveyed quickly, never interrupting the humanity of the film but juxtaposed close enough to the humanity to make the point ….. sometimes very strongly “half of the 3.5 million people living below the poverty level are women with children under 6 years old;” sometimes somewhat more subtly ….. Dr. Douglas Kirby, a man who has made the study of sex education his life talks about the situation. He is cool, his research information is data supported, but he just reports this data ….. no judgments, no remedies ….. and as he talks, over his shoulder there is a framed card which says “No easy answers.”

From purity balls to “The Silver Ring Thing,” from relationships between fathers and daughters to single parent households, from religious young people casually well-dressed testifying to their beliefs about sex and when and where one engages in sex to the stereotypical “frat boys,” barely out of bed at nine in the morning, attired in the usual baseball cap worn backwards over hair which hasn’t seen a comb in days, t-shirts which haven’t seen the inside of a washing machine in too many days, shorts worn at half mast and flip flops-- insensitive louts, their smart-ass answers to the interviewer’s questions at odds with their body language which belies much of what they’re saying.

The camera work is superb, never wavering, never shifting, and never calling attention to itself, mindful of how easy it is to rip the audience out of the fabric of the film, resulting in the penultimate achievement of a film….. pulling the audience into the screen, engaging them with the people on the screen to the point where many find themselves talking to it.

Film interviews can be deadly.

What’s interesting about a “talking head”?

Motion pictures should move ….. that’s one of the first rules you learns film school. Producer-Director Cassie Jaye never went to film school-- and never should, unless she’s the teacher.

Her talking heads are fascinating and she treats her subjects with respect. She strips away the artifice, but she preserves their dignity. Nowhere is this more apparent in the film than in the sequence with Renny, a beautiful young woman, now in her early twenties, who became a mother barely into her teens, who had an abortion and must live with that forever. Her eyes are old way beyond her years. She’ll break your heart, and that’s just one instance which makes a film of approximately 90 minutes seem like barely fifteen.

The questions are simple, the answers provocative and controversial, the solution is devastatingly elusive but, at the very least, one knows the questions and Daddy, I Do should be a standard beginning in every school’s conversation with our kids about sex. 

Daddy, I Do is a phenomenal piece of work. It’s Cassie Jaye’s first film. It is a labor of love, self-financed and family supported. It will not be her last film, but I’ll wager it is the last one she’ll have to self-finance.

By Dr. Howard Rosenberg
(Edited for web length.)