By Noma Faingold. (October 1, 2026)
Picture Josephine, a sporty eight-year-old girl, without a care in the world, jogging in Golden Gate Park with her father at dawn. Being that it’s a familiar activity, she races ahead to show her athletic dad what she can do. Abruptly, she comes upon a man following a female jogger into a public restroom. The woman screams and frantically tries to get away, but he catches her and forces her to the ground.
Josephine instinctively hides behind a nearby tree and watches it all, a clumsy, violent sexual assault. Josephine, played by newcomer Mason Reeves, is transfixed. She is scared and doesn’t dare move. A variety of subtle expressions roll across her face. Her father, Damien, played by Channing Tatum, comes into view and interrupts the brutal act. After making sure his daughter is out of immediate danger, he chases after the assailant. Damien catches him with the help of police.
Yet Josephine will never be the same.
By writing and directing the drama, Josephine, San Francisco-born writer/director Beth de Araújo, who grew up in the Richmond District, was willing to relive her own childhood trauma in order to prevail over her lingering emotional wound.
However, Araújo admits, “Going to Golden Gate Park is still quite hard for me. I am very specific about when, where and with whom.”
Channing Tatum, Beth de Araújo, Mason Reeves, and Gemma Chan attend the ‘Josephine’ Premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival (Photo by Neilson Barnard)
Josephine premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, winning both the Grand Jury Prize: U.S. Dramatic and the Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic. The last time a film won those top two awards was in 2021 with CODA, which went on to win Best Picture at the 2022 Oscars. In February Araújo landed a lucrative U.S. distribution deal with indie Sumerian Pictures. The film will be released in theaters November 20 (limited cities) and December 4 (nationwide).
The film has its Bay Area premiere on October 6 at the Rafael Film Center, during the 49th Mill Valley Film Festival (October 1-11), at which time Araújo will be honored with the MVFF Award for Bay Area Rising Star.
Josephine writer-director Beth de Araújo. Photo courtesy of Sumerian Films
The scene of the crime in Araújo’s film resembles what she vividly remembers about her incident. The rest of Josephine is well-researched fiction in its depiction of the emotional fallout in the family, how each character agonizingly works through the aftermath and the legal process of the case. Josephine’s mother, Claire (Gemma Chan) tries to get her daughter to open up. She is empathetic but unsure how to help Josephine heal.
In Araújo’s home, her parents never discussed the incident with her. “I didn’t get an answer when I was younger when I asked. That silence wasn’t helpful for me. It really left me in a dangerous mental place,” she said. “I don’t know when the right time is to talk to children about sexual assault. I’m not sure any of us do because it’s so under-researched. Everyone was kind of in a hard place. I never spoke to my parents about it until I was 27.”
Araújo, who studied sociology at UC Berkeley and earned an MFA at the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles, moved to L.A. in 2009, but frequently visits the Bay Area. Her parents (her father is originally from Brazil and her mother is Chinese-American), live in the same home where she grew up. One of her three sisters lives in the Excelsior and one lives in Berkeley. The parents of her fiancée, composer Miles Ross (who wrote the score for Josephine), live in Mill Valley.
At age seven, Reeves was discovered by Araújo at the Sunday Clement Street Farmer’s Market. The director was passing out flyers just a few weeks before the 35-day shoot was scheduled to begin. Reeves caught Araújo’s eye and she asked to meet Reeves’ parents. Four auditions and several visits later, Araújo knew Reeves was her Josephine. “We got really lucky finding her,” she said. “Mason is a very special kid. She’s an actress. She’s so in-tune with every single person’s emotions in any space she’s in. The gift of actors is they’re best at thinking with their heart. It’s their job. Mason is like that.”
Beth with Mason Reeves: photo Jennifer Reeves. Photo by Jennifer Reeves
Araújo, Chan, Tatum and Reeves’ parents were extremely cautious about exposing the young lead to the mature content of Josephine. Reeves never read the whole script. She learned her lines with her mother. When filming the assault scene, it was the crew who Reeves was looking at. She never saw the disturbing sequence. Reeves, now age 10, has never seen the film in its entirety. She does seem to enjoy participating in the post-screening Q&As at film festivals.
The incident alters Josephine’s behavior in various ways as the film moves along. She gets into a fight with a boy at school. During dinner, she asks her parents when she can get a gun, much to their alarm. She thinks she sees the criminal everywhere, including in her bedroom, the way children are worry that a monster is coming to get them, following a nightmare.
“We just kept stressing to her, just tell the truth,” Araújo said in crafting a convincing performance out of Reeves. “To feel the idea of the scene, we would do a lot of sense memory work. I would have her write down things in her own life when she was frustrated, angry, sad or proud of herself and we would assign them to scenes. She understands the job of an actor is to just feel the moment, to listen and be present with the other actors in the scene.”
Josephine, while unsettling, has received critical acclaim and favorable feedback from festival goers.
“What surprises me is that there are a lot of people who really want to talk about this subject matter,” she said. “The film gives people a space where they’re allowed to.”
Josephine is Araújo’s second feature after writing and directing 2022’s Soft & Quiet. It was crucial to her that Josephine be filmed in San Francisco. “I love to write for locations. It’s an integral part of everything that I do because it’s a character and a mood,” she said. “It’s a city that is so visually rich, it’s asking to be filmed. There’s a reason Hitchcock shot all those films in the Bay Area. Everything you look at is delicious.”
Beth de Araújo will be honored with the MVFF Award for Bay Area Rising Star for directing Josephine, on October 6 at 7 p.m., at the Rafael Film Center during the 49th Mill Valley Film Festival, Oct. 1-11. Araújo, Gemma Chan and Mason Reeves will be in conversation. A second screening is at noon on Oct. 7, at Sequoia Cinema in Mill Valley.
See the full Festival schedule here.
Director/Screenwriter Beth de Araújo wrote about the Sundance Screenwriters Labs she attended in 2018 to develop Josephine. Read it here.
Follow Beth on Instagram
The Josephine website. Sign up to learn when it will show near you.
Noma Faingold is a writer and photographer who lives in Noe Valley. A native San Franciscan who grew up in the Sunset District, Faingold is a frequent contributor to the Richmond Review and Sunset Beacon newspapers, among others. She is obsessed with pop culture and the arts, especially film, theater and fashion. Noma has written about poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, artists Tamara de Łempicka, Isaac Julien, and Wayne Thiebaud, numerous independent filmmakers, and singer/songwriters Janis Joplin, Diane Warren, and Linda Smith for EatDrinkFilms.