Con Josephine, which closes the Competition section, the Berlinale knew that it was saving the best card for last. In reality, the organization had scheduled the most important titles for the last days, as if it were the wine of the wedding at Cana. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Prize in the Drama section of the last Sundance Festival (the two most important awards), Josephine delves into what its leading actress, Gemma Chan, defines as follows: “The film asks the question: how does a child deal with the violence of the world? And, really, that can apply to all of us. How do we persevere, how do we respond, how can we overcome fear, hate and trauma, and still maintain our humanity?”
Because Josephine is an eight-year-old girl who accidentally sees a rape in a park in San Francisco. His gaze meets the rapist’s for a second, and since the camera remains at the height of the adults’ knees (a point of view that worked very well for Montxo Armendáriz in Don’t be afraid, another sexual assault film), the spectators accompany the horror that the creature sees.
And what’s more, it rots and grows inside him, because his parents, skillfully played by Chan (EternalsCrazy Rich Asians) and Channing Tatum (who in recent times is struggling to change the direction of his career, as shown in this film, Blinks twice y Roofman), They decide not to take her to the psychologist. He is a loving father who, deep down, behaves like an elephant in a china shop. She, a cold mother who dumps her own traumas on her daughter. Thus it is impossible for the girl to even verbalize what she experienced.
Because Beth de Araújo has improved a lot since the already interesting The hate club. He repeats some simplistic blur, but maintains the idea of terror as a narrative engine: poor Josephine imagines that at night the rapist visits her and watches from a crouch.
At the Berlinale, the girl Mason Reeves, whom the director found at a weekly market in San Francisco, posed for photographers, but did not go up to the stage to speak to the press. A success.
The rest of the cast did speak. De Araújo said that the seed of the story lies in his own life, when, at the age of eight, he was walking with his father through Golden Park in San Francisco. There they interrupted a rape. “Over time I wanted to decide to explore irrational fear with the hypervigilance that I had left,” he explained. It took 12 years to carry out the project, which was going to be his first feature-length film. “But it was a challenge for which he needed time and solutions, and along the way he got ahead The hate club.” By the way, she did point out that she did not have to testify before a judge at the trial for that crime (her father did), and that part came up during the investigation. “With more than five years they can be called to testify… I decided to commit to telling what the legal system is like.”
It wasn’t a great appearance before the press either. Channing Tatum haggled over any question as much as he could, and the moderator was unable to get those questions answered or to respect some more political issues, the hot topic of the Berlinale. When Tatum was asked about the letter from the 81 filmmakers criticizing the organization for its lukewarmness over the genocide in Gaza and if he had thought about joining, an Israeli journalist shouted to remember the Hamas massacres, at which point the actor decided to duck and the moderator took the speaking turn.
The director spoke about the girl’s physical language to reveal what is going on inside her, and Channing Tatum recalled a story that occurred with his daughter in preschool, after a fight at school: “The conversation I have under the bridge with Josephine was with my daughter: you will never have problems with me if you protect yourself.” In her case, the girl fought to protect a friend. “If someone is doing something that you ask them not to do and they don’t listen to you, you have every right to protect yourself. And I will always support you,” he explained. Is that why Tatum did Josephine? “For that, and for being involved in something honest, beautiful and important.”