Sundance Film Festival: Channing Tatum drama ‘Josephine’ wins top jury and audience awards

Director Beth de Araujo, left, and Channing Tatum attend the premiere of "Josephine" during the Sundance Film Festival on Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, at Eccles Center in Park City, Utah. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

PARK CITY, Utah — Beth de Araujo’s potent family drama “Josephine,” about an eight-year-old girl who witnesses a sexual assault, won top prizes at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. The juries announced the winners Friday in Park City, Utah.

“Josephine,” starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as the girl’s parents, became one of the festival’s early consensus hits despite its difficult subject matter, which was based on the filmmaker’s own experience at that age. The young girl is played by newcomer Mason Reeves, whom de Araujo discovered at a San Francisco farmer’s market. The film won both the U.S. dramatic grand jury prize and the festival’s audience award but does not yet have distribution.

De Araujo wiped tears while accepting the award and gave an emotional speech about rape culture and survivors.

“It’s very hard to talk about rape. Even just saying the word makes people uncomfortable. But because of this there only leaves more shame and silence for survivors,” De Araujo said. “In order to honour survivors we must try to understand the people who rape in an attempt to prevent it from happening again. We have the resources, we just don’t make it a priority.”

Filmmakers Janicza Bravo, Nisha Ganatra and Azazel Jacobs were the jury for the U.S. Dramatic Competition. They cited the film’s “depth and nuance of storytelling” and its “delicate and elegant execution of a challenging subject matter.” Other titles in the U.S. dramatic competition included Josef Kubota Wladyka’s “Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!,” which got a special prize for directing.

The grand jury prize for best U.S. documentary was awarded to “Nuisance Bear,” about a polar bear navigating a human world.

“It took us 10 years to make this movie,” said “Nuisance Bear” co-director Gabriela Osio Vanden, who was visibly emotional accepting the prize. “We all do have a story to tell, including animals.”

“To Hold a Mountain,” about a mother and daughter in the remote highlands of Montenegro defending their land from becoming a NATO military training ground, took the international documentary prize. “Shame and Money,” about a Kosovar family who has to move from a village to the capital, picked up the narrative world cinema award.

Louis Paxton’s quirky Scottish film “The Incomer,” about a pair of siblings on a remote island whose lives are upended when an awkward government official (Domhnall Gleeson) arrives to try to evict them, won the innovator award in the festival’s NEXT section.

Other films that won audience awards included documentaries “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez,” about the pioneering playwright and screenwriter, and “One in a Million,” which chronicled a family’s journey from Syria to Germany and back again across 10 years.

“American Pachuco” director David Alvarado said Valdez came to the first ever Sundance in 1981, when it was still called the U.S. Film and Video Festival, with the film “Zoot Suit.” That a documentary about him played at the last Sundance in Park City is a full circle moment.

“It shows the full commitment to the Latino story that Sundance has always championed,” Alvarado said.

The festival previously awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, which celebrates outstanding films representing science or technology, to Andrew Stanton’s “In the Blink of an Eye.”

High profile Sundance films like Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite,” the queer horror “Leviticus” and the Charli xcx movie “The Moment” did not premiere in competition and were not eligible for jury or audience awards.

Sundance prizes can sometimes be the first stop for eventual Oscar nominees and winners, which notably happened with “CODA” and “Summer of Soul.” Documentaries more so than narrative films have a better track record of making it to the Oscars stage. Three of last year’s special prize winners are nominated for best documentary this year, “The Perfect Neighbor,” “Cutting Through Rocks” and “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” and the two others were among the festival favourites, “Come See Me in the Good Light” and “The Alabama Solution.”

Last year’s U.S. Dramatic grand jury prize went to the war satire “Atropia,” while the audience award was given to the dark comedy “Twinless,” with Dylan O’Brien.

The Sundance Film Festival runs through Sunday.

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Lindsey Bahr, The Associated Press