Beth de Araujo, who won two Sundance awards for Josephine and will screen the film at the Berlinale on Friday, said her heartbreaking drama highlights how the lack of accountability for perpetrators of sexual abuse “creates further silence” for victims and survivors.
“We need accountability. The more silence, the more shame, the more survivors have to heal completely on their own, the less accountability there is for perpetrators, pedophiles, rapists,” de Araujo told a Bernale press conference, continuing her tearful speech at Sundance where she won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award.
“Shame on them,” she continued, sitting alongside the film’s stars Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan, who also produced it.
The film is de Araujo’s autobiographical fiction about an 8-year-old boy, played by newcomer Mason Reeves, who witnesses a rape in Golden Gate Park. Tatum and Chan play Josephine’s parents, who must work through the girl’s trauma as they seek justice for the survivors.
De Araujo said “Josephine” has been 12 years in the making and was intended to be her first film developed at Sundance Labs. After having difficulty raising funds, he made his feature debut with the one-shot thriller Soft and Quiet, which premiered at SXSW and was subsequently acquired by Blumhouse.
She said the film grew out of a memory of when she (when she was 8 years old) and her father “interrupted a sexual assault in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.” She explained that her first impulse was to explore the hyperarousal state she was left with after that day through the eyes of an eight-year-old girl. “It’s kind of an exploration of the intersection of unwarranted hypervigilance and rational fear that we feel as we walk through the world,” she said. Although she did not have to testify in court like Josephine, she did extensive research into the process by which children accurately portray their experiences in film. “I was trained to be certified as a witness advocate at a hospital for rape victims,” de Araujo said.
Asked whether society had changed for victims and survivors of sexual assault in recent years, she said: “Depending on what country you think you are, I don’t think we’re equipped to deal with this problem right now,” adding: “I think that’s probably the case in the UK this week.” The latter comment could be an allusion to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest in the UK in connection with his association with Jeffrey Epstein.
Meanwhile, Tatum said that as the father of a 12-year-old girl, the film resonated with him. “That conversation I had with Josephine under the bridge is a conversation I had with my daughter,” Tatum said. “If you protect yourself, you’ll never get in trouble with me. If you don’t listen to someone who asks you not to, you have the perfect right to protect yourself. I’ll forever be rooting for you. Don’t fuck my daughter.”
But the press conference reached a tense point when a reporter asked Tatum about an open letter signed by Mark Ruffalo and Tilda Swinton and criticizing the festival for its “silence” in Gaza. Politics have been a hot topic at this year’s Berlinale since jury president Wim Wenders said at the opening press conference that filmmakers should “stay out of politics” in response to a question about the ongoing conflict.
After the reporter asked a question, another member of the audience began shouting, causing Tatum to disrupt. “I don’t even know exactly what’s going on,” he said, looking at host Jacqueline Lianga. It is not clear exactly what the person shouting said, but the words “Hamas” and “Gaza” could be heard.
Tatum added, “I didn’t really hear what you said, but now I think so,” but remained tight-lipped on the subject. Lianga then changed his tune and told reporters: “Thank you for your question. I’ll be happy to discuss it afterwards, but I think we’ll move on to other questions.”
Later in the press conference, Tatum was asked why he wanted to appear in “Josephine” after appearing in lighter films such as “Magic Mike.” He said he ultimately only wanted to work with de Araujo after seeing her first film. “Beth wrote this and I read it and I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to be a part of something that was honest and beautiful and important,” he said.
Chan, who first joined the project in 2019 after being sent the script by director de Araujo, said in an interview with Variety ahead of the film’s Berlinale premiere that he emotionally identified with the film because he witnessed a stabbing in London in 2012 and decided to have the courage to testify in court.
“It was a big thing for me to want to be a part of the story and connect emotionally,” Chan said. “The world is a very dangerous place. Unfortunately, I know that and a lot of people know that. It really hit me raw.”
David Kaplan, one of the film’s principal producers, told Variety during an on-stage fireside chat in Berlin that despite de Araujo’s growing profile, financing for Josephine is nearly impossible.
“Ninety-nine percent of the people we went to said, ‘Would you like to make this movie?'” “Absolutely not,” Kaplan recalls.
Director Kaplan said of the difficulty of raising money for the film, “There was resistance, there was apprehension, there was skepticism about commerciality, there was concern from parents about what the movie was about, and there was concern that it would be too dark.” “I think there were a lot of concerns about who is this movie for? What is this movie going to be like? Is it commercial?”
He also pointed to “perhaps an inherent bias against films directed at women and assault survivors.”
The film was just acquired for the US by Sumerian Pictures in a competitive seven-figure deal.
Josephine is executive produced by Kaplan, Josh Peters, Beth de Araujo, Marina Stabile, Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan, Mark H. Rapaport and Christine Chan, with Emmanuel Nuñez and Jordan Rapaport serving as executive producers.
