76th Berlin International Film Festival: Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan Premiere Beth de Araújo’s New Film Josephine

Channing Tatum, Mason Reeves and Gemma Chan at the photocall for Josephine in Berlin. Photograph (above) and cover picture of Dua Lipa by Jay Zoo for DAM

At the Grand Hyatt Berlin, hours before the evening premiere lit up the Berlinale Palast, Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan and newcomer Mason Reeves gathered for the official photocall for Josephine. Writer-director Beth de Araújo's film arrives with formidable momentum and a reputation for confronting difficult subject matter with clarity rather than sensationalism. Story by Jeanne-Marie Cilento. Photography by Jay Zoo

Director Beth de Araujo's new film

took 12 years to bring to the screen. 

AT the Berlin International Film Festival, few Competition titles arrived with the emotional gravity of Josephine, Beth de Araújo’s long-gestating examination of childhood trauma and moral awakening. Premiering to a packed house at the Berlinale Palast, the film puts an eight-year-old girl at the centre of a story most cinema prefers to tell from the adult vantage point and in doing so, shifts the balance of power.

Set in contemporary America, the film follows a father and daughter whose ordinary morning is ruptured by an act of violence witnessed in real time. What unfolds is not a procedural nor a revenge drama, but a study of psychological aftershock. De Araújo is less interested in spectacle than in the slow seep of fear: how a child absorbs adult evasions, how silence can grow into hyper-vigilance.

Newcomer Mason Reeves carries the film with startling composure. Her Josephine is observant, brittle and increasingly self-protective, a child recalibrating her understanding of safety. Opposite her, Channing Tatum delivers one of his most restrained performances to date as Damien, a father caught between instinctive protectiveness and an inability to articulate the truth. Gemma Chan brings measured complexity to the role of Josephine’s mother, anchoring the domestic sphere as fissures widen between the adults.

The film examines how a single moment can fracture a childhood, reshape a family’s internal dynamics and test the boundaries between protection and denial

The cast and crew gather for a photograph in Berlin

De Araújo’s direction is precise and unsentimental. The camera frequently remains at Josephine’s eye level, allowing the audience to inhabit her limited yet intensely perceptive worldview. 

The result is a film that interrogates not only violence, but the systems, familial and legal, that attempt to contain it. Questions of testimony, accountability and parental responsibility ripple beneath the surface, lending the narrative tension without sacrificing intimacy.

At its core, the film examines how a single moment can fracture a childhood, reshape a family’s internal dynamics and test the boundaries between protection and denial. What distinguishes de Araújo’s approach is her refusal to look away from the subtle, lingering consequences of trauma, particularly as experienced by a young girl navigating a world that suddenly feels altered.

In Berlin, the film feels particularly resonant. The Berlinale has long championed socially conscious storytelling, and Josephine fits within that tradition. As the festival jury deliberates, de Araújo’s film stands as a reminder that cinema’s most radical gesture can be to look directly and unflinchingly through the eyes of a child.

As photographers called out for one more frame and the February light filtered through the hotel windows, the atmosphere was both celebratory and sober. This was not simply another red-carpet premiere; it was the unveiling of a film that asks questions about accountability, fear and the uneasy space between innocence and experience.

Scroll down to see more highlights of the cast and crew from the film premiere's photocall in Berlin