Channing Tatum drama Josephine wins top awards at Sundance Film Festival
British actor Gemma Chan also stars in the film.
Beth de Araujo’s drama Josephine, about an eight-year-old girl who witnesses a sexual assault, won top prizes at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
Josephine, starring Channing Tatum and British actor Gemma Chan as the girl’s parents, became one of the festival’s early consensus hits despite its difficult subject matter, which was based on the filmmaker’s own experience at that age.
The young girl is played by newcomer Mason Reeves, whom de Araujo discovered at a San Francisco farmer’s market. The film won both the US dramatic grand jury prize and the festival’s audience award, but does not yet have distribution.
De Araujo wiped tears while accepting the award and gave an emotional speech about rape culture and survivors.
“It’s very hard to talk about rape. Even just saying the word makes people uncomfortable. But because of this there only leaves more shame and silence for survivors,” De Araujo said.
“In order to honour survivors we must try to understand the people who rape in an attempt to prevent it from happening again. We have the resources, we just don’t make it a priority.”
Filmmakers Janicza Bravo, Nisha Ganatra and Azazel Jacobs were the jury for the US Dramatic Competition.
They cited the film’s “depth and nuance of storytelling” and its “delicate and elegant execution of a challenging subject matter”.
Louis Paxton’s quirky Scottish film The Incomer, about a pair of siblings on a remote island whose lives are upended when an awkward government official (Domhnall Gleeson) arrives to try to evict them, won the innovator award in the festival’s Next section.
