Yes, Tonight ‘Josephine’ — Sundance Leaves Utah on Many High Notes

The final Park City edition of the Sundance Film Festival wrapped up over the weekend, handing out its top prize to a movie about surviving trauma. Josephine, Beth de Araújo’s semiautobiographical look at an 8-year-old who witnesses a rape and struggles to process her feelings about it, won both the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic as well as the Audience Award.

An early favorite among fest-goers since its afternoon debut on Day Two of the festival, Josephine maintained its buzzy status with a dolorous, riveting tale of a spiraling San Francisco family, with a star-making turn from its grade-school lead Mason Reeves. Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan play her loving parents, a doting but conflicted couple who struggle in vain to protect their child in a world that will never feel safe again.

The trio was visibly moved the day after its premiere, when they arrived to a standing ovation at the Ray Theater after an 8:30am crowd watched the second screening of their emotionally staggering film. “I was nervous last night,” said Reeves about their first public Q&A. “But nowhere near as nervous as I am at my ju-jitsu competitions.”

Tatum, a father himself in real life, here plays a physically imposing, emotionally suppressed dad who would rather give his rattled kid self-defense lessons instead of therapy sessions with a child psychologist. He laughed ruefully about a scene where his character fully supports violence as a valid reaction. “You know that moment when I tell her, ‘You have my full permission to hurt him?’” he said. “I had that exact conversation with my daughter.”

Chan’s character, a professional dancer in the film, also talked about how daunting it was for Araújo to give her such a physically demanding role — especially with Tatum as a co-star. “Are you doing to make me do a dance in a movie with Magic Mike? Are you joking?” she laughed. Josephine is a sober two hours; its sometimes tough-to-watch reckoning has made it such a hard commercial sell that the acclaimed film still hasn’t closed a distribution deal.

No surprise, then, that a few Sundance dramas this year deployed humor as a panacea. Charlie XCX star vehicle The Moment, now in theaters, premiered to a frenzied crowd at the 1,200-seat Eccles Theater last week and — despite being hyped as a mockumentary — surprised viewers with a much more serious-minded look at the stress and strain of being a global phenomenon, refracted through the wink-wink lens of the Brit singer as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The jokes are few and far between (but can be quite funny, especially a cameo encounter with an impressively droll Kylie Jenner). The tone is less manic than it is moody, and much more of a condemnation than a send-up of the pressures to maintain pop stardom.

The Directing Award: U.S. Dramatic went to Josef Kubota Wladyka for Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, a beguilingly charming story about a competitive ballroom dancer struggling with the sudden death of her fleet-footed husband who slowly finds new passion when she meets a dashing but married instructor. Musical fantasias mix with poignant yearning and a few slapstick bits of physical comedy to make Ha-Chan a crowd-pleasing delight. Sony Pictures Classics picked up the sentimental romance only a few days after its debut, so expect a theatrical release before the end of the year.

Movies were more contemplative than usual, and reflections on the past were a recurring theme. One of the most hauntingly jubilant documentaries to unspool was Once Upon a Time in Harlem (no distributor), the final film by William Greaves (posthumously completed by his son David), a vital record of a cocktail party he engineered in 1972 at the home of Duke Ellington. The concept: invite all the living participants of the Harlem Renaissance and let the cameras roll while they reminisce about what transpired a half century earlier. The result: pure gold, a priceless wealth of memories from intellectuals and artists alike — still full of dogged debate, flinty with incisive insights and blessed with such eloquence that their memories virtually come alive with inspired vitality.

Sam Green’s The Oldest Person in the World (no distributor), a meditative essay film that uses longevity as a springboard into contemplating mortality, changes its interview subject nearly annually as the filmmaker interviews one end-of-life centenarian after another over the course of a decade. From one country to the next — The United States, France, Italy, Japan, Spain — and from his own midlife-crisis Green talks to elderly women (they’re all women), who seem happily perplexed as to why they have lived so long. The unofficial sponsor of the film is the Guinness Book of World Records, which helpfully guides Green to one subject after another, while the filmmaker himself struggles with a deadly medical issue while also becoming a father at age 50. While not quite revelatory about the nature of a life well lived, The Oldest Person does allow us to share precious moments with humanity at its extremes.

One of the more touching Sundance premieres was the incarceration melodrama Frank & Louis (no distributor), Petra Volpe’s look at the relationship between a prisoner tasked with caring for an older inmate suffering from Alzheimer’s. Kingsley Ben-Adir gives an admirably controlled performance as Frank, serving a life sentence for murder, who struggles to tend to the volatile Louis (Rob Morgan). Prone to paranoid outbursts, fits of confusion and fear, and wrenching moments of clarity thinking about his estranged daughter, Louis embodies Volpe’s devastating portrait of erasure. Time ticks by, dissolving memories for those condemned to complete their lives behind bars.

Don’t worry, Sundance wasn’t all about bummers. Like an oasis in a desert of earnest heartbreakers, the festival served up some downright giddy selections. Josephine Decker, last at Sundance with her psychologically harrowing biopic Shirley, returned with the hilarious Chasing Summer (no distributor). Stand-up comic Iliza Shlesinger wrote and stars in this failure-to-launch comedy about a restless thirtysomething, in between jobs and lovers, who comes back to her Texas hometown and confronts the failures of her teenage past: estranged parents, bitter older sister, hunky ex-boyfriend, and the scary clique of mean girls who ruled the school two decades before. Delightfully cringe, Chasing Summer leans into its admittedly predictable premise with an adorable awkward-misfit lead and some genuine head-shaking hilarity.

More outrageous was the ingeniously silly Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass (no distributor). It’s a gleeful exercise in profound stupidity from director David Wain, who made his Sundance debut a quarter-century ago with the deliciously dumb 2001 classic Wet Hot American Summer. Starring Zoey Deutch as a sunny but determined smalltown Kansas fiancée hellbent on nailing Jon Hamm before she gets married, Gail Daughtry is possibly the most inane sex comedy since Hot Tub Time Machine, an unholy Airplane!-inflected mash-up of The Wizard of Oz and Porky’s that is relentlessly, proudly, aggressively, brilliantly idiotic.

From laughter to tears, giggles to trauma, Sundance ran the gamut — sometimes all in the same movie. Surreal midnight movie Buddy (no distributor), from demented director Casper “Too Many Cooks” Kelly, stars a Barney-type unicorn who terrorizes the children on his TV show when he transforms into an ax-wielding psychopath. Keegan-Michael Key voices the homicidal maniac, who keep insisting on hugs even as he’s bludgeoning the kids around him. A downright unsettling deconstruction of ’90s preteen monoculture monoliths, Buddy will upset and delight in equal measure.

Violence onscreen often reflects a violent world, and Alex Pretti’s Minneapolis murder at the hands of ICE agents felt eerily apt just a day before the premiere of Alex Gibney’s inspiring documentary Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie (no distributor), based on the author’s own memoir. A chronicle of the 2022 incident when a wannabe assassin attacked the controversial British-Indian author at a public appearance and stabbed him repeatedly before being restrained, Knife shows Rushdie’s remarkable rehabilitation and recovery — despite losing an eye and almost use of his left hand — with graphic, intimate hospital footage that his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths shot and shared with Gibney.

“I’m a writer, I never expected to show so much of my body!” said Rushdie after the film screened to a rapt audience that earned a standing ovation. “We all feel like violence is around the corner. It’s a good moment for a film like this to be out here.”

No stranger to political violence, Rushdie has endured death threats ever since his 1989 novel The Satanic Verses inspired Iran’s religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwah for what he and many others perceived as blasphemous fiction. And Rushdie sees parallels to Trump’s vicious suppression of the press and any other expressions of liberty that displease him. “Violence unleashed by the unscrupulous using the ignorant,” he explained about reactionary forces against diverse and critical opinions. “The uncultured and the ignorant and the tyrannical don’t like it.”

Knife is a deeply philosophical film, a collage of imagined images and verité footage (including the actual onstage attack shot from multiple angles by onlookers) during which Rushdie contemplates the nature of intolerance, the essential need for freedom of expression, and the healing power of reconciliation. “This is what art is for, isn’t it?” said Rushdie. “To help us think. To help us feel. To help.”