There are few rising filmmakers we here at IndieWire get more excited about than Beth de Araújo, who first captured our hearts (and our anxieties) with her first film “Soft & Quiet.” For her sophomore film, de Araújo remains compelled to tell unnerving stories that are ripped from real-life events. In the case of “Josephine,” that also means real-life events that actually happened to the filmmaker when she was a child.
Per the film‘s official synopsis, it “follows the psychological fallout after eight-year-old Josephine (Mason Reeves) witnesses a crime in Golden Gate Park. As she acts out, her parents (Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan) struggle with helping their daughter cope, while facing their own fears around the topic and how to address it with their child.”
Tatum and Chan, who both give stunning performances, also produce the film. The real find, however, is newbie Reeves, who offers a nuanced and heartbreaking performance as the titular character. In her very first on-screen role, Reeves brings a nuanced, brave, and deeply intuitive performance as the titular character, an eight-year-old San Francisco resident who witnesses a horrific crime and has to deal with the emotional fallout. De Araújo and her casting director cast a wide net to find Josephine, and ultimately discovered Reeves at a local farmers market in San Francisco, near where the filmmaker herself grew up.
As I wrote out of the film’s premiere at Sundance 2026, “de Araújo’s approach to portraying on-screen violence only furthers that heartsick feeling: straightforward, unsparing, and absolutely devoid of any possibility of being compared to ‘torture porn.’ What we see, what Josephine sees, is something no person should ever witness or experience. And that’s the root of the film’s power: how do we talk about things that we should not have words for?”
After winning big at Sundance — where the film won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, and topped our own critics’ poll — the film will next screen at the Toronto International Film Festival, where we assume it will gather still more fans.
Sumerian Pictures will release “Josephine” in theaters on Friday, November 20. Watch the film’s first trailer below.
