Beth de Araújo was eight years old when she saw something that would linger with her for the rest of her life. But she never really grappled with it until her 20s, when she sat down to write a script about the incident. “I decided to make Josephine an extreme version of what it feels like to have female fear and keep it through the eyes of an eight-year-old girl,” she tells Vanity Fair in an exclusive first interview about the project.
De Araújo’s film Josephine, which will have its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, follows the parents (Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan) of a young girl named Josephine (newcomer Mason Reeves) as their family faces trauma and legal proceedings after she accidentally witnesses a violent sexual assault in Golden Gate Park. It’s a harrowing and deeply personal project, requiring a delicate and deliberate touch from de Araújo, Tatum, and Chan.
Josephine faces sexual assault head on, bringing into the light an experience that’s devastatingly common, but rarely spoken about. Says de Araújo, “There’s so much silence around it—even saying the word rape is very uncomfortable for everyone, and I totally understand why. But if we say that this is accepted in society, what else are we willing to accept?”
The inciting incident is based closely on de Araújo’s memory of going to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco with her father and witnessing a crime. By the time de Araújo reached her 20s, it suddenly felt like the only story she could write. “It kind of came at me in a flood, where I had realized throughout my life my hypervigilance had been growing to the point of paranoia,” she says. “And it was the only thing I could do.”
She wrote a first draft in 2014 and submitted her script to the Sundance Labs, where she chiseled and carved it into shape. De Araújo won a SFFILM/Rainin Filmmaking Grant, which allowed her to watch a sexual assault case from start to finish at San Francisco Hall of Justice, helping to inform her next draft. While fine-tuning the script, she’d also started seeing a therapist and working at the Los Angeles Rape and Battering Hotline, which allowed her to serve as a witness advocate for sexual assault victims at the hospital as well. But de Araújo had not yet directed a film. So instead of shooting Josephine as her debut, she first made Soft & Quiet, a horror-fueled thriller that premiered at the South by Southwest film festival in 2022.
Soft & Quiet caught the attention of Tatum’s then girlfriend Zoë Kravitz, who met with de Araújo, and suggested that Tatum might be right for the lead role. “It was really painful to read just because I could tell it was coming from a very real place,” says Tatum of the script. “She’s so brave and really is never, ever not taking a swing at really trying to tell something from an honest and special place.”
