Berlin, Feb 20 (EFE)
American actor Channing Tatum revealed his more personal side on Friday at the presentation of ‘Josephine’, by Brazilian-American director Beth de Araújo, which closed the Berlinale’s final day of competition. He declared that his daughter has his full support to defend herself physically if someone does something she doesn’t want.
“The conversation I had with ‘Josephine’ under the bridge is a conversation I’ve had with my daughter: You’ll never have any problems with me if you protect yourself. If someone is doing something you ask them not to do and they don’t listen, you have every right to protect yourself, and I will always support you. And don’t mess with my daughter, because she listened to me,” he warned at a press conference.
The actor explained that when his daughter was in preschool, he received a call from the school because she had gotten into a fight with another boy. The school principal explained to him privately – because, naturally, fighting is not allowed at school – that she was proud of the girl because she had stood up for a friend.
“I took her for ice cream right after,” she added.
In De Araújo’s film, eight-year-old Josephine (newcomer Mason Reeves) witnesses a rape in a park where she had gone with her father early that morning to play soccer.
Damien, the father, played by Tatum, avoids his daughter’s questions and tries to cope with what happened by enrolling her in a self-defense course, unable to address the girl’s emotional state.
Josephine displays increasingly aggressive behavior at school, and a conflict arises between the parents as well in how to deal with the situation.
De Araújo explained that the film is based on a real event, a personal memory from when she was eight years old and she and her father managed to interrupt a sexual assault in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
“I just wanted to take the hypervigilance I was left with after that day and explore it through the eyes of an eight-year-old girl, exploring both the irrational hypervigilance and the reasonable fear we have as we walk through the world. That’s how ‘Josephine’ was born,” she revealed.
Unlike the film’s protagonist, De Araújo didn’t have to testify personally—her father did—but she was so shocked to discover during her research that children as young as five can testify in these types of incidents that she felt “very committed to representing justice and the legal system as they are.”
Philip Ettinger, who plays the rapist, says he felt “obligated to try to be part of the purpose” of what the film was trying to portray.
He said he was deeply moved when he received the script because of how the filmmaker addresses a young girl’s response to this trauma in a way he had never encountered before and with which he said he strongly identified, so much so that, to some extent, he felt “the need” to take on the role.
Tatum, for his part, noted that when he read the script he simply wanted to be part of “something honest, beautiful, and important.”
‘Josephine’, which also stars Gemma Chan as Josephine’s mother and Syra McCarthy as the victim of the sexual assault, is one of the 22 films competing for the Golden Bear at Saturday’s ceremony.
