If you managed to catch filmmaker Beth de Araújo’s feature directorial debut, the Gotham-nominated SXSW premiere “Soft & Quiet,” you already know how uniquely skilled de Araújo is at building dread and terror on both a technical and emotional level. Her first film, which debuted at the fest in 2022 before getting released in October of that year , used the one-take technique to follow a group of white supremacist women as they meet, mingle, and eventually attack a pair of POC sisters.
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While not based on a single real-life story, “Soft & Quiet” was the result of deep research into actual (and terrifying) culture shifts and personal experiences, from de Araújo’s own stories around a racist teacher to the Amy Cooper birdwatching incident and even the “Tradlife” movement. For her next film, de Araújo is again mining her own life and the world around her to tell what we expect to be another chilling tale.
And this time, she’s got Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan to lead it. SFGATE (via a very informative Filmmaker Magazine tweet ) reports that de Araújo’s sophomore feature film “Josephine” shot in and around San Francisco from April to June. De Araújo and producer David Kaplan confirmed the casting to the outlet, and Kaplan added that the film is “a story of a family dealing with a personal trauma after seeing something unexpected and horrifying in Golden Gate Park.”
Kaplan added that de Araújo has been trying to get the film made for about a decade, and attempted to launch it multiple times before the start of the pandemic. “Soft & Quiet,” a much smaller production, was shot in 2021. Kaplan added that Chan has been attached to the project for “several years,” before Tatum joined her.
While the existence of the film itself is not so secret — its IMDb page notes that it’s in production, with a logline that tells us, “After witnessing a brutal attack in Golden Gate Park, eight-year-old Josephine is plunged into a maelstrom of fear and paranoia. She acts out with increasing violence looking for any way to regain control of her own safety.” — Tatum and Chan’s involvement is fresh information. In an email to IndieWire, Kaplan also shares that the film’s cast includes New York-based actor Philip Ettinger and SF-based actress/filmmaker Syra McCarthy.
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SFGATE reports that “the film’s screenplay was inspired by a childhood experience of de Araújo’s, which she recounted at a storytelling event for The Moth in 2019. In her story, de Araújo recalls the trauma of witnessing a sexual assault at Golden Gate Park as a child, and the years of anxiety that followed. When she was 8 years old, de Araújo and her father drove to a remote part of the park to play baseball. When her father turned off the car, they heard screams for help.”
The filmmaker told SFGATE “that only one scene from ‘Josephine’ mirrors this childhood memory, and that the rest of the story is almost completely different.” The eponymous Josephine is the film’s protagonist, an 8-year-old girl, played in the feature by SF native Mason Lily Reeves, who the filmmaker found while scouting for the role at the Clement Street Farmers Market. Tatum and Chan play Josephine’s parents in the film.
In a 2022 interview with IndieWire about “Soft & Quiet,” de Araújo expounded on her ethos toward tough stories rooted in real-life. “I think it’s polarizing, by design. It’s meant to make you feel very uncomfortable,” she said of her first feature. “There’s either the reaction to sit in that discomfort and ask why, [or] there are people who don’t like feeling the discomfort and they quickly disengage and run away from it. I don’t think there’s necessarily a wrong way to feel and respond to this. It’s very heavy, and I’m just happy that people are engaging with it in any way.”
Sounds a bit like “Josephine.” The film does not yet have a distributor, but is likely to pursue some festival berths to drum up interest. It’s got ours already.
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