She Turned a Childhood Memory She Couldn’t Forget Into an Award-Winning Film

Trigger warning: This story includes mentions of sexual violence.

Back in 2014, when she was 28, Beth de Araújo was living in Los Angeles, trying to make it as a screenwriter. One unbearably hot summer night, she went to see a movie at the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. When the lights went down in the partially full theater, a man cut across the aisle to sit in the seat between her and the wall. She immediately knew something was wrong. He draped a long coat across his lap, and 10 minutes into the film, Araújo felt his fingers moving up her shorts. She flinched; he did it again; she flinched again. When he did it a third time, she mustered a whisper, “Please stop.” Then she felt his penis on her leg and raced into the lobby to tell the manager. By the time they returned to the theater, hardly a minute later, the man was gone; an audience member said he had run out the side exit. “You read about this all the time, how women feel like they don’t want to make a scene or bother anybody,” Araújo tells me, “and I couldn’t believe I fell into that so easily.”

It was the first time she’d been groped, but in an instant, the trauma brought her back to an experience she’d had as an 8-year-old in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Very early on a Saturday morning, while her mom slept in, she and her father headed out to play baseball. Her dad parked their van near a secluded, grassy area of the park. As soon as he turned off the engine, they heard a piercing scream—a woman repeatedly shouting for help. Her dad told her, “Don’t move,” and jumped out of the van, disappearing into the clearing. But she was a little girl and she was scared, so naturally she didn’t do as she was told. She got out of the van to go look for her dad. But instead of her father, she found a woman, naked from the waist down, standing in her socks in the damp grass, sobbing silently into her hands.

After the incident in the theater, Araújo was catapulted into what she now says she would “almost term my psychotic break.” She couldn’t sleep or shower for a week; she was convinced the man from the theater had followed her home and was watching her, waiting for the opportunity to attack. The only thing she could do was write. The morning after she was groped, she sat down to work on the script for Josephine, a film based on her experience with her dad and the woman in the park and the months that followed. “Josephine just poured out of me,” Araújo recalls. “I used that inciting incident to tell a much larger story about one girl’s journey to resilience in a world that looks increasingly dangerous as she comes to understand it.”

Eleven years and many hurdles later, Josephine premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past January, starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan, and took home the two top prizes—the Grand Jury Prize (awarded by the official jury) and the Audience Award (voted on by festival attendees). On November 20, it will open in select theaters in the U.S. “People are craving a space to talk about sexual violence and rape. It’s not just me; I don’t think there’s space for anyone to talk about this publicly, and it’s a huge problem,” Araújo says. “So if this movie gives people even just the smallest space to be able to talk about something that has greatly affected them, then that’s why I made it.”

Araújo was raised in a family of four girls in San Francisco. “My parents created this amazing life for me in this really beautiful pocket of the country,” she says, “and even still, they can’t always protect you from the realities of the world.”

Her father ran track for Brazil in the Olympics and won an athletic scholarship to attend college in the U.S. He met Araújo’s mother, a Chinese-American dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, in a physical education course. After they married and started having kids, her mom retired from ballet to focus on child-rearing, while her dad worked full-time with elevators as an electrical engineer, or what Araújo calls “an elevator man.” (“I always joke with him about his job, because it’s such a perfect visual metaphor for an immigrant trying to be upwardly mobile in America,” Araújo adds with a laugh.)

Her name and her sisters’ names were inspired by Little Women. “Somehow my mom knew she was having four girls, and it’s her favorite novel, so she was committed to the cause,” Araújo says. She was named Beth even though, as a writer, she’s clearly the Jo of the family. “I’ve always loved storytelling,” she says. “Even as a kindergartner, I remember when it was my first time learning about storytelling, I was like, ‘I love this class—this is the best.’” She and her sisters all grew up playing soccer with their dad, but whenever she could, she would go to one of the five independent movie theaters in her neighborhood. “Anytime soccer practice was rained out, it was my time,” Araújo recalls. “I got to do what I wanted, and it was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to go see a movie, obviously.’”

She went on to play soccer at the University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in sociology, while also taking as many poetry and African American studies classes as she could. When soccer ended for her after college, she felt a little lost, but soon began taking night classes in writing while working as a manager at a landscape and gardening company. “I thought I’d probably just try to be a poet and publish my small poetry books every now and then, and that would be my perfectly happy life,” she says. Then she took a screenwriting class, and after a lifetime of loving film, she realized, “Oh, someone writes the movies.”

Araújo started going to Los Angeles once a week for screenwriting classes. Before long, she found an apartment and begged for a waitressing job to keep herself afloat while she wrote scripts. After two years of floundering, she enrolled in the American Film Institute and finally learned how a film gets made—and also that she liked to direct: “I am too much of a control freak to let my scripts go,” she explains.

After graduation, Araújo directed five short films within five years. It was during those years that the incident at the Egyptian Theatre took place. About a week after she was groped, she went for a walk at the Silver Lake Reservoir, because being around large groups of people has a calming effect on her when she’s spiraling. In a crowd of “very shabby-chic outfits,” while she “was just very shabby”—how she put it in her 2021 performance at The Moth about the experience—dressed in pajamas, her hair with a week’s worth of grease, she called her father. “I remember hearing the worry in his voice: ‘What’s wrong? Are you okay? What’s going on?’” Araújo says. “I didn’t know where to start, so I just blurted out without thinking, ‘What happened to the woman in the park?’”

What she couldn’t fully understand as a child is that after her dad got out of the van that day in the park, he had interrupted a rape. The man sprinted off upon seeing Araújo’s dad, but as a former Olympian, he had no trouble giving chase. As he was running after the assailant, he was yelling to bystanders to call the police. When officers arrived at the park, they found the survivor and Araújo alone and put them in the back of a squad car. She and the woman didn’t interact; Araújo remembers seeing her hands shaking and watching her put them underneath her hamstrings to stop them from trembling. (Though many of the details in Josephine differ from what Araújo experienced in reality, the police car scene in the film is exactly as she remembers it.)

After 45 minutes, the cops found the rapist and Araújo’s dad, who had kept him in his sights the whole time from a safe distance after the man had pulled out a knife. Araújo was still in the back seat with the victim when the officers asked her to confirm they were arresting the right guy; she remembers the woman saying, “Yeah, that’s him,” before ducking out of sight so he wouldn’t see her. Araújo, on the other hand, stared the man down, cementing his image in her brain: his tight blue jeans, teal shirt, and blond mullet (the rapist in the film dresses similarly).

Eventually, the car door opened and Araújo saw her dad standing there. Relief washed over her as she and her father closed the car door and walked away. On the way back to the clearing, she pressed him: “Why did you leave me alone? What’s going on? That woman is crying.” And he said, “I know, let’s just go play baseball.” They threw the ball around for an hour like nothing had happened.

She and her parents never talked about what occurred, but the memory lingered. The following week, her dad enrolled her in self-defense classes, and she heard her mom use the word “rape” on the phone to describe the incident in the park. Araújo didn’t know what that meant, so she cracked open the thick dictionary her parents kept in the study. It took her a while to find the definition because she thought the word was spelled R-A-I-P, but she found the correct term eventually (that detail is also in the film, though it has been modernized—in the scene, Josephine surreptitiously looks up “raip” on her mom’s phone).

Learning about rape at such a young age, on her own, shattered Araújo’s sense of safety. She became hypervigilant—checking that her parents had chained the door before going to sleep, asking people to stand guard in front of public restrooms; sometimes, in high school, she couldn’t sleep unless she knew her father was home. When she was at college and no longer under her parents’ roof, her sleeping pattern became even more erratic. By the time she moved to Los Angeles, she had a hard time being in confined spaces with men who were strangers and would exit elevators if she found herself alone with a man she didn’t know.

Her constant alertness is why she finds it so surprising that she was groped. “I didn’t see it coming,” she says. “And as someone who was already hypervigilant, I was so shocked by how I froze in the moment. I didn’t want to overreact. And I can’t believe I thought that. I should have shouted and been like, ‘Turn on the lights. This person has his penis out touching me.’ But I didn’t. I didn’t want to make a scene. Me, of all people.”

When she asked her dad on the phone that day about what happened with the woman in the park, he posed a question of his own: “How did you get into the police car?” It had been nearly 20 years and he had always wondered. They exchanged their versions of that day, and her dad told her that he felt guilty for leaving her behind, that he wasn’t ever sure he made the right decision. She told him he had, even though it had impacted her life profoundly. “Everyone always talks to me about that, like, ‘Oh, wow, I can’t believe he left you alone.’ And I’m like, ‘Why not? He was chasing a rapist. What more noble thing?’” Araújo tells me, adding that without her father’s actions, the man might never have been found (he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison). “I really saw it as, ‘Wow, not everyone would be as courageous as you and make sure this person got arrested.’ I’m glad he didn’t worry about me, because that was, in my perspective, the right thing to do.”

About a month or so after Araújo was groped, she became certified to work for the Los Angeles Rape and Battering Crisis Hotline and as a witness advocate, who accompanied survivors while they were having forensic exams performed at the hospital. In addition to therapy, “being a witness advocate probably helped me the most,” she says. “There’s something about reclaiming the narrative that is really powerful and reframes your own power within the context of these men. I had this very specific perspective of how scary and evil and violent these kinds of men are—and they certainly are—but I also see them as pathetic, and that has given me some sense of my own strength when I think of who I am in comparison to who they are.”

She would often call her dad after her shifts, and they would talk about what she had learned. “Every single solitary person I met said something like, ‘I should have done this. This would’ve stopped it. This would’ve saved me,’” Araújo says. “There was so much internalizing the blame, because it’s too hard to digest the idea that you don’t really have control of your life or your body.” Many of the survivors she encountered wanted to have exams performed to check for sexually transmitted infections, but they did not want to report the crime to the police. “Which was the most difficult and hard to swallow bit for me,” Araújo says. “And I totally understand why victims and survivors don’t want to put themselves through that, because it just felt like, What would they get out of it? What kind of gratification? Even at its best, the judicial system often leaves you having no sense of resolution.”

Araújo also followed a sexual assault case through the courts from beginning to end, shadowing the public defender, who was defending the rapist. She used such experiences to inform her script for Josephine. She wrote the first draft in a month and sent it off to the prestigious Sundance Institute, where she was selected to attend both the Screenwriters Intensive and Screenwriters Lab, and also the Directors Lab the following fall. While the first draft had spilled out of her in a month, the second took her nine months and bore little resemblance to the original.

Soon she had a polished script, but no way to get the project off the ground. The deck was stacked against Josephine: There was the dark subject matter, of course. But it was also hard to cast a leading man who would play second on the call sheet to an 8-year-old—and without a big-name leading man, no one wanted to finance the film. And there was a catch-22 for the first-time director: “I had to shoot a first feature to then be able to show people, like, ‘Okay, I can do a feature,’” Araújo explains.

So she pivoted. Once again, she drew on her personal experiences as a child—this time, with a schoolteacher—and combined that with inspiration she drew from the Central Park bird-watcher incident as well as research into tradwives to produce a script for Soft & Quiet, a feature she wrote, shot, edited, and sold in just 11 months. The film, which IndieWire called “a one-shot, real-world white-power nightmare,” follows an afternoon and evening in the life of an elementary school teacher as she builds a support group of white supremacy for women from her small town (their meeting’s refreshments include a pie branded with a swastika).

Soft & Quiet premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2022 and was released in theaters and on streaming platforms that November. It caught Channing Tatum’s eye, and just like that, Araújo had Josephine’s leading man. Gemma Chan signed on next, as Josephine’s mom. Araújo found her Josephine, then 7-year-old Mason Reeves, at the San Francisco farmers market; it is Reeves’s first acting role.

When Josephine received the top prizes at Sundance, Araújo was stunned, delivering a tearful speech onstage. “Everything about this project has been so challenging from start to finish, so I was just confused, like, ‘Something’s going well?’ But I will say, I think it just shows how many people really came together and worked really hard to make a film that normally would not get financed in this industry.”

A few weeks after our first conversation, I reach Araújo at her home in L.A. as she’s packing to attend film festivals in San Sebastián and Zurich, before gearing up for the U.S. theatrical release in November. She’s never been to either country before and is especially looking forward to getting a slice of Basque cheesecake. I ask her what she hopes viewers take away from Josephine, and she answers from two different perspectives. “Beth the filmmaker is not prescriptive. My work is to hold up a mirror and say this is how people are feeling and experiencing something, myself being one of them,” she says. “My job is to tell the truth as I see it and feel it, and for everyone to do with it what they want. And if that creates some cultural conversation, that’s the job of the artist.”

But as a human, she says, she can’t help but hope it creates change. “Beth the citizen has a much stronger perspective on everything,” she says. “It’s almost like women have decided, ‘This is the world we have with men, and I guess we have to do everything we can to not be raped,’ versus, ‘This is such an unjust way to live as women, and how are we not allowed to have control of our own bodies in this world?’ So I hope Josephine gives people the time and space to decondition themselves in a way that will benefit their life: Why are we the ones who have to protect ourselves? Why are we the ones who have to move our bodies differently in this world to keep ourselves safe? And how have we come to accept that that’s okay?”

In her own life, she’s working to reclaim the outdoors. “The incident in the park deeply messed up my relationship to nature,” Araújo explains. “I saw nature as a vulnerable place to be, because people can’t hear you scream. So I couldn’t ever really connect with the outdoors in the way that I’ve craved.” She says she’s working up the courage to go camping, first at a spot she knows just north of the city, and eventually at Yosemite National Park, where she has fond memories of going with her family as a child. She says, “I want to reclaim that space as mine.”

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A version of this story will appear in the December 2026/January 2027 issue of ELLE.

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