Audience members were moved to tears during the world premiere of “Josephine,” one of the first major revelations out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. One of the people who was blubbering at Park City’s Eccles Theater was none other than the film’s star Channing Tatum, who confessed that he “cried five, six, seven times” as he finally watched the movie for the first time.
Festival-goers didn’t just weep through “Josephine.” They also laughed and cheered during the few lighthearted moments in the otherwise heart-wrenching drama about a young girl who witnesses a brutal sexual assault at her local park in San Francisco. Tatum and Gemma Chan star as Josephine’s parents, who struggle to console their young daughter as she grapples with the aftermath of the traumatic event.
Beth de Araújo wrote and directed the film about a harrowing real-life experience she faced as a child. When the director took the stage at the Eccles on Friday afternoon, she wiped away tears of her own as she was greeted with a standing ovation. The crowd continued to clap and cheer as de Araújo brought out her actors, newcomer Mason Reeves who plays Josephine, as well as Tatum — who picked up his pint-sized co-star and swung her around — and Chan.
“I started writing this in 2014 when I realized that something happened to me when I was young that haunted me,” De Araújo said during the Q&A after the screening. “I took a stab at writing about female fear, and how that’s shaped who I’ve become. I kept it through the eyes of an 8-year-old and how she learns about male aggression, and I took the fear to the extreme.”
Friday’s premiere was a star-is-born moment for 8-year-old Reeves, whom the director discovered at a farmer’s market in San Francisco. As for her first time on a film set, Reeves declared “what I liked most was all of it” — prompting laughter from the audience. Reeves continued to charm the crowd, saying she hopes to keep acting but would prefer a less-intense genre the next time around. “I have five different [in mind]…. the first is action, then fantasty, a musical, a movie with animals in it, and the last is one a movie filmed in Paris.”
Throughout the film, Tatum and Chan’s characters are forced to reprimand their daughter, who acts out as she wrestles with a newfound fear and anger that she can’t yet comprehend. Tatum, in real life the father to a 12-year-old daughter, was worried that Reeves wouldn’t be able to differentiate pretend from reality.
“I was concerned about her actually thinking I was mad at her,” Tatum said about Reeves. “I was like, ‘You know I’m just acting, right?’”
Reeves, decked out in a sparkly silver dress, interjected: “He kept asking me about it, and I was like, ‘I’m fine!‘”
Chan, who was the first actor to sign onto the film, said she felt “there was a truth radiating from the page” while reading the script. “It’s a really challenging subject matter, and I thought the way [Beth] approached it and forced us to see it through a child’s eyes was brave.”
Before the audience ventured back into the cold, De Araújo thanked everyone for “engaging with something that isn’t an easy sit” and added, “I hope you feel like you had an opportunity to crack your heart open and give yourself the time and space to imagine a better world for yourself.”
