Sundance 2026: Josephine

When football-mad eight-year-old Josephine (Mason Reeves) witnesses a crime she can’t comprehend, her world unravels. Realising her parents, Claire (Gemma Chan) and Damien (Channing Tatum), may not have all the answers, the protagonist searches for some of her own as she struggles to control her newfound feelings of rage and sorrow.

Beth de Araújo’s film, a harrowing, poignant drama on the poison of gender-based brutality, features gut-wrenching performances by Tatum and Chan as two adults unprepared to explain the world’s horrors to their daughter. Once again de Araújo teams with cinematographer Greta Zozula, who also shot the writer-director's 2022 film Soft & Quiet, and here Zozula lowers the camera's eyeline to match Josephine’s point of view, offering a bold visual solution to depict the girl’s lingering trauma.

Spotted by de Araújo at a farmers’ market in San Francisco, where the film is set, Reeves gives a fiery turn as Josephine as she learns to navigate the world as a woman at a heartbreakingly young age. When her knuckles whiten around a sharpened pencil when she thinks she’s being followed – a familiar gesture for many women – it hits like a sucker punch. Damien's solution is to push self-defence onto his daughter. It's an understandable response that treats the symptoms, but does little when institutions fail to address the cause of systemic violence. 

Josephine is a harrowing, poignant study on the poison of gender-based brutality that rejects sentimentality to challenge our normalisation of female fear. It doesn’t shy away from displaying the shortcomings of a system that debates the definition of consent in courtrooms. In a candid comeback, Josephine says to the female defence lawyer, “Why aren’t you [helping]?” — it's a question we should be asking others and ourselves more often.

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Josephine had its world premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize (U.S. Dramatic Competition)