Inspired by the Emmy-Award winning short documentary of the same name (Netflix, 2023), The Dads chronicles fathers of trans and nonbinary children as they are forced to choose between country and family when a new right-wing administration and conservative Supreme Court take hold in the United States. Filmed over the course of a year spanning retreats in rural Maine and Minnesota, protests, family milestones, a pivotal U.S. Supreme Court decision, and the collapse of gender-affirming care for youth, The Dads captures this national reckoning with remarkable intimacy through verite footage and interviews with the film’s main protagonists, as documented by Emmy-Award winning director and producer Luchina Fisher and executive producer Dwyane Wade. This is fatherhood as an act of radical love and resistance.
The Dads
The Dads
Filmmaker Notes:
After my Emmy Award-winning short documentary, also called The Dads (Netflix), was released in 2023, the film became the springboard to The Dads Foundation, supporting fathers and male caregivers of trans and gender expansive children. As I was accepting the Daytime Emmy Award
in June 2024, some of the dads from the short film were gathered with a new group of fathers for the second Dads Retreat. One of the original participants, Stephen Chukumba, encouraged me to keep filming and came on board as a producer. The result is this timely and urgent feature documentary that explores one of the most pressing civil rights battles of our time – gender identity — through the intimate lens of fatherhood. When we started filming at the second Dads Retreat, the fathers were cautiously optimistic. After the presidential election, the mood shifted dramatically. Several fathers, including those with teenage children, made plans to flee the United States in response to rising sociopolitical threats against trans people and gender affirming healthcare. The film documents the emotional journeys of these trans families as they become “political refugees” and raises critical questions about parents’ rights, democracy, and our collective responsibility to vulnerable communities. It also offers a compelling counter-narrative of fatherhood and masculinity, as the dads share their vulnerabilities and question what they’ve been taught about gender and themselves. In a time of political division, isolation and misinformation, The Dads shifts the narrative away from what divides us to what brings us all together: love, connection and community.
