“There’s such a sense of helplessness right now in America”: Beth de Araújo on Josephine

This week at LFF sees the UK premiere of a film that had a lasting effect on festival audiences when it screened at Sundance and Berlinale earlier this year – Josephine, the second feature from Brazilian-American director Beth de Araújo. From its stark and unsparing opening scene, it immerses us in the experience of an eight-year-old girl who witnesses a rape while out running with her father. The film is based on a real event from the director’s childhood, when she and her father interrupted a sexual assault in Golden Gate Park. Her father caught the perpetrator and assisted in his arrest, and nobody mentioned it again until de Araújo’s late-twenties – decades of silence that left her to fill in the gaps. 

That spectre of childhood confusion hangs over every moment of de Araújo’s film, fully embodied by the unerring instinct of young newcomer Mason Reeves as Josephine. The girl’s parents (played by Gemma Chan and Channing Tatum) clash over coping mechanisms as they face the psychological fallout from what Josephine has seen. Reviewing the film from Berlinale, critic Rachel Pronger wrote: “Josephine is clearly a film about loss of innocence, but its cleverness lies in how it demonstrates that this loss cuts in multiple directions. A child’s sense of safety has been shattered, but so has her parents’.” Any parent must accept that you can’t always protect children from pain. Less considered is how to help them process the pain of others. There is no expert-approved, child-safe way to admit that yes, this horrific thing happens, and not only that, it is common. 

Ahead of the film’s first public UK screening, we spoke to de Araújo about the long process of translating her childhood experience into Josephine, and the politics of depicting sexual violence on screen. 

Where were you at in your life when you started writing Josephine?

I was around 28. I got off the phone with my father. [It was] the first time he had ever spoken about what happened. Everything just came out like a flood, for the first draft. It’s not a movie that screams ‘money maker’. I had to go off and make another feature film first [Soft and Quiet, 2022]. Luckily Channing [Tatum] saw that and then attached to this project and we were on our way. By the time the release happens, it’ll be 12 years.

What kind of safeguards were in place for Mason Reeves, who plays Josephine, both during production and after the film? 

We’ve had long conversations about it. We never open up the Q&As to the audience when Mason is there. If a journalist expresses that they want to get into deeper subject matter, we leave her out of the press conference or Q&As. In Mason’s own words, I’ve heard her describe it as, “Josephine sees something bad and it makes her scared. And it’s about her overcoming her fear.” But it’s a wire act. Every day, every scene, it’s talking it through with her parents. It was asking them if there was a way that they preferred me talking to her about the subject or if there were certain instructions that they felt were better for her understanding. But to be honest, I’ve actually never spoken to Mason about the subject matter. I just left the conversations to her mom and her dad. They know Mason best. They said the word [rape] had come up and they said, “it’s how you hurt someone with sex”. She has a younger sister, so when her mom was pregnant, they explained, in a similarly broad way, what sex was. And so I said, “that’s great. I don’t need to explain anything else”. I just need to be able to say, this is the man that hurt the woman, and this is the woman. 

The truth is, I don’t know when the right time is to talk to your kids about rape. I don’t think anybody does. It’s such an under-researched topic. But I will say silence, for me as an eight year old, left me in a dangerous place to fill in the gaps on my own. And I commend them for not ignoring it or trying to scoot over the question when it came up, because I think it left me more curious, trying to understand it because I could tell, it felt like a secret. Mason hasn’t seen the film entirely, and I think, when she’s 18, that’s up to her if she wants to. 

I read that you cast Mason after finding her at a farmers’ market. What drew you there?

I don’t know how to explain it, but I just felt like I’d find her there. She’s growing up blocks from where I grew up. And this area in San Francisco, it’s a very heavily east Asian area, a very Chinese area. And then right next to it, it’s a very caucasian neighbourhood. And the farmers’ market is right on the border. It’s a mix of these two neighbourhoods, and so you just see a lot of mixed-raced children. The odds of someone being half Chinese and half white would be strong. It’s a ritual for [Mason’s] family [that] they walk there and they go and buy all their favourite snacks. Mason was sprinting to this date stand, and that turned my neck, because it’s a slow sea of people, and then all of a sudden you just see this lightning bolt cut across. And that’s very Josephine’s energy – sporty and she really likes to move around a lot. I approached her mom with the flyer. When you tell someone you’re trying to cast them for the daughter of Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan, they’re like, “what is this crazy person trying to dupe me into?”. When her audition tape came in, I was floored. I said to everyone, “it’s probably her”. She was so concentrated, this girl. I know she’s a normal little girl, but I have nieces her age, and I know they could not handle this kind of concentration and focus. And I think it’s partially because she is in jiu-jitsu, so she has this competitive nature.

When did you know that this was the right fit?

We did improvisation. I said, “I want you to think of the person who’s hurt you the most and you don’t have to tell me and I want you to think about what you would like to say to them. Then I want you to hit me as hard as you can right in my arm.” And she put her head down and really focused, and then she looked up with these eyes. It’s cemented into my memory. She screamed, “why would you do that?” And then she punched me right in the arm. I burst out laughing because I was so elated. I think as a director, what you want is to know what you want. And to know what’s right. Once I know what the choice is, I can run to it, when you’re still kind of oscillating and not sure, that’s always the uncomfortable part for me. I met her at the farmers’ market that Sunday and I gave her the red Converse for her to start breaking in and wearing as Josephine. 

There’s a specific scene from the film that sticks in my mind. It’s when Syra McCarthy’s character, Sandra, wants to find her hair tie, which she lost in a violent struggle as she was sexually assaulted. Josephine finds it for her, and is so happy to have done so. It’s heartbreaking, because Josephine is trying to fix a problem she doesn’t understand in this child-friendly way. 

No one’s asking me about that scene yet. When we were filming the first AD whispered into my ear, “this is my favourite scene”. I remember all these small things from the morning and I remember thinking ‘why is her hair down as she went running?’ And it was because it was such a struggle, and it had got lost in the struggle. I remember fixating on it as a kid. And it’s all these small little things that you pick up that inform your memory of the moment. And so that was the inspiration for it. As you said, I think as kids we just want to fix things. We want everything to be okay, so we can do the fun things. She thinks this is going to just solve the day, this is going to make everything better. Everyone’s going to be okay again. They can all play, her dad can come back. This woman is gonna be in a much better mood. And it’s just a big wash of confusion for her. 

You’ve described the character of Greg, the perpetrator, as a ‘dark mentor’ for Josephine, as he begins to appear in her imagination. Can you tell me more about that?

I have thought about him quite a lot throughout my life. He’s taken different forms in terms of what I think about him and how I think about him. Josephine starts to add on layers of his personality to her. And I think he’s an extension of her consciousness. Why do people do bad things? Why is his aunt the one paying the bail? Does he not have parents? What happened to him? Why is he like this? Am I like this? And I think when we see people doing bad things, especially as a child, we start to try to piece together how and why this is and how and why we are part of the same species. A huge inspiration for the film was A Prophet [2009], which I love so much. They use a very similar device of an extension of someone’s imagination. When the darkness is beginning to take over Josephine, she feels, “maybe I am like him. Maybe we’re supposed to act like this in order to keep ourselves safe, we’re supposed to be the prey”. And in that way, I think he she’s toying with the idea that he is her mentor. 

Why was it important for the film to include a graphic rape scene? And how do you feel it would have changed the film if you had made a different choice?  

This was the quintessential reason – I just don’t think we’d connect to her [Josephine]. At a certain point the audience might say to themselves ‘how could she possibly be this scared’? And I just couldn’t risk that. I hope the audience feels that they are experiencing a story through her. They can not like her, but they still have to understand why and how she became this way. And I was really worried that if we didn’t, that would be lost. There are really wonderful reasons why you don’t want to show violence against women on film. And there are effective ways to do it that are not showing it. I think every author has to make that decision for themselves. As a filmmaker, I wanted to show that this is what it is. You know, not hidden, not just sort of heard, not doing sound design and cheating it. I wanted us to fully have to experience what we talk about when we use the word rape. And the reason I felt a strong conviction to do that was because, as a witness advocate, I’ve heard so many women tell me “I should have fought back harder.” But the truth is, their goal in that moment was to keep themselves alive, and when you fight back, it does become more violent. And I think that’s part of what I wanted to show about sexual violence: it’s violent. 

How did the character of Josephine’s father, Damien, change after Channing Tatum came on board?

Pretty significantly. He was always written as foreign born and I wanted Damien to feel like he was an underdog in America, there was a little bit of a chip on his shoulder. But then Channing [he’s] from the South [and] in a coastal city, he sees himself as a fish out of water. I just decided, let’s lean into that because that’s the essence of why this man has a puffed up chest. The only thing I was worried about was ‘is anyone going to buy that he’s this obsessed with soccer?’ But I think it’s okay. There’s enough of a following.

What was Channing Tatum like to work with?

We talked a lot about the kind of conversations he’s having with his daughter around the subject matter, and the way that his father parented him. I was nervous about him in the beginning. We really think of Magic Mike when we think of Channing Tatum. I think that’s the first association most people have. My sister would argue She’s the Man [2006]. But I really wanted to make sure we got the shine off of him. He’s a tired dad, his cortisol levels are through the roof. He’s just exhausted. He’s sacrificing his body and his life for his daughter at all times. Channing ate pizza every night, he gained 30 pounds for this. At the end, he was like, “I am never doing that to myself ever again Beth!” We think of him as this really fun comedy-action person. But this is an artist with a capital A. He thinks so critically about every line he’s saying, about the script, about the arc. As he’s coming on set, he’ll memorise the lines because he doesn’t want to sit with it too long. It brings about this nervousness and fear, but that’s a great place to live as an artist, a place between being really excited and really scared. He has this really fun big kid energy, especially with Mason [Reeves]. He and Gemma [Chan] helped shape her performance so much, and I really couldn’t have done it without that. 

Josephine’s parents are grasping in the dark, trying to deal with the fallout, but throughout the film you never doubt the love from either, even when they’re getting it wrong.

I studied sociology at undergrad, which I think informs a lot of how I think about my work. I had one of Alain de Botton’s quotes in my book for financiers. I hope I’m not botching it, but it’s something like ‘the impossible task of a parent is to prepare your child and be honest with them about the truths of life without them giving up the will or the hope to live.’ It’s true. I genuinely don’t know, if and when I have kids, how I would say this to them or explain these very challenging subjects. I think it could help a lot if we just had more research on sexual assault and and child psychology in general. I wish there was a bit more of a guidebook. 

At the recent Critics Choice Association award ceremony, you used your acceptance speech to focus attention on the Cornell rape case. What did you hope the audience would take from it?

I think I just didn’t really know what else to say. I didn’t know how else to be myself and be honest on the day. I think sometimes, especially right now in America, there’s such a sense of helplessness. We can’t take everything on fully, we just do what we can do as people to try to help and resist. And I think that was what I was trying to communicate. We can all do better to resist. I didn’t so much have an agenda as it’s all I’m thinking about. The details, they’re so horrifying and the worst part is that it’s not even an anomaly. 

► Josephine is screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival on 13, 15 and 17 October and arrives in UK cinemas on 20 November.