The Sundance Film Festival was in full swing Friday in Park City, with Channing Tatum, Olivia Wilde and Charli xcx movies premiering back-to-back at the storied Eccles Theatre in the evening.
First up was “Josephine,” writer-director Beth De Araújo’s raw drama about an 8-year-old girl (Mason Reeves) whose life and sense of safety is upended after she witnesses a sexual assault in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Tatum and Gemma Chan play the parents who are unsure how to help her navigate these new emotions and fears. The film, which is part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition, is based on De Araújo’s own experience of seeing something scarring at that age.
There wasn’t a seat to spare, and over 400 people on the waitlist were unable to get in. Afterward the crowd gave a long standing ovation as the filmmaker and actors came onstage for a Q&A.
Araújo discovered Reeves at a San Francisco farmer’s market, where she told her mother she was casting for someone to play Tatum and Chan’s daughter.
Reeves said one of her favorite parts of the film was a scene in which she and Tatum eat a jelly doughnut.
“I only ate the outside and fed the jelly part to him,” Reeves said.
Tatum chimed in: “That is true.”
He also praised his young co-star, saying “how good is she?” He watched the film for the first time with the Sundance audience and said he cried “five, six, seven times.”
The next film, Gregg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex,” brought a distinct change in tone to the Eccles. It’s the story of a college graduate in his early 20s (played by Cooper Hoffman ) who gets his first job as a kind of intern/assistant to a renowned art world provocateur named Erika Tracy (Wilde), who Arkai described as “bold, daring and very controversial,” a cross between Robert Mapplethorpe and Madonna.
“It’s the story of their affairs and the impact it has on this kid’s life and how it kind of turns his whole world upside down,” Araki told The Associated Press. “It’s fun, it’s colorful, it’s sexy. And it’s a ride.”
It’s a film that Araki has been working on for over 10 years, as it evolved from a comic “Fifty Shades of Grey” with a female intern to what it is now.
“After #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein, all the stuff that was going on, it was literally like, I don’t really want to see a woman getting dragged around by the hair,” Araki said. “I don’t want to seed that kind of patriarchal dynamic, even if it’s consensual.”
Flipping the gender roles and making the young intern a man made the movie more interesting for Araki, “as a filmmaker who has always been heavily influenced by feminist film theory and feminism in general,” he said.
At the same time, he was absorbing news stories about Gen Z and how they don’t have sex or relationships anymore and a new dynamic emerged.
“What I knew as an old person, as an old-timer, in terms of socialization, dating, sex, all of this stuff that seemed to be kind of falling away,” Araki said. “And so that kind of became a major theme of the movie.”
Things Wilde’s character says are things he has also said in interviews about sex and sexuality. Her character gets into generational debates about it. And ultimately it’s sex positive.
“It was very important to me to make something sex positive,” Araki said. “‘I Want Your Sex’ is like the opposite of ‘ Babygirl,’which I found to be very sex negative.”
Wilde said after the premiere that she wished “more people made movies” like Araki: getting a cool group of people together and making something fun in a noncorporate environment.
The film also features a supporting turn from Charli xcx, who was a fan of Araki and whose “Brat” album cover was partially inspired by the title credits to his film “Smiley Face.” When she heard about this new movie, he said, she asked if she could be in it. He was interested, but told her agent that she needed to do a self-tape “like everyone else” to play the part of Hoffman’s girlfriend.
“The character is not her. That’s what’s so fun,” he said. “She’s American, she’s super uptight and kind of pill.”
She filmed her scenes in one day, on a two-day break in the middle of her Brat tour.
It was a Charli xcx double feature at the Eccles with the world premiere of her self-referential mockumentary “The Moment,” about a rising pop star, before it hits theaters on Jan. 30.
Earlier Friday the world premiere of William David Caballero’s mixed-media film “TheyDream” immersed viewers in the intimate story of a Puerto Rican family learning to process grief through art. Caballero and cowriter Elaine Del Valle have screened short films at Sundance in the past but were honored to bring a full-length feature to the festival.
“Sundance has always been about possibility for me — about artists being given space to take creative risks and tell personal stories,” Del Valle, who is also a producer on the film, told AP. “Bringing our first feature, especially in Sundance’s final year in Utah, carries a different weight.”
Associated Press writer Hannah Schoenbaum contributed.
