Beth de Araújo's Josephine Was Built Out of a Silence That Lasted Decades
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Josephine, Beth de Araújo's second feature, gets its UK premiere at the London Film Festival after screenings at Sundance and Berlinale earlier this year. The film draws on a real event from the director's childhood, when she and her father interrupted a sexual assault in Golden Gate Park.
Her father caught the perpetrator and helped with his arrest, and then nobody mentioned it again until de Araújo was in her late twenties — decades in which she was left to fill in the gaps herself. She has said she was around 28 when her father first spoke about what happened, on a phone call, and that it was the first time he had ever done so.
That is the more interesting origin story than any single scene: not a family that hid something, exactly, but one that let a large, frightening thing go unspoken until a child had grown up and built her own explanation for it. The film is the explanation, revised in public.
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The asymmetry is what gets me. The father does the decisive, competent thing in the moment — catches the man, helps the arrest — and then the subject simply drops for decades.
And the gap still has to be filled by performance rather than memory: the film rests on young newcomer Mason Reeves to carry that childhood confusion, which is a strange burden to hand a child.