PARK CITY, Utah – Beth de Araujo’s powerful family drama “Josephine,” about an 8-year-old girl who witnesses sexual assault, won the top prize at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. The jury announced the winners on Friday in Park City, Utah.
“Josephine”, starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as the girl’s parents, became one of the festival’s early unanimous 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 Araújo discovered at a San Francisco farmers market. The film won both the US Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and the festival’s Audience Award, but has yet to receive distribution.
Filmmakers Janicza Bravo, Nisha Ganatra and Azazel Jacobs were the jurors for the US Dramatic Competition. He cited the film’s “depth and nuance of storytelling” and “delicate and elegant execution of challenging subject matter”. Other titles in the American Dramatic Competition include Joseph Kubota Vladyka’s “Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!” Which received a special award for direction.
The Grand Jury Prize for Best American Documentary went to “Nuisance Bear”, about a polar bear who travels to the human world. “To Hold a Mountain,” about a mother and daughter who save their land in the remote highlands of Montenegro from becoming a NATO military training ground, won an international documentary award. “Shame and Money”, about a Kosovar family who must move from a village to the capital, won the Narrative World Cinema Award.
Louis Paxton’s quirky Scottish film “The Incomer,” about a pair of brother-sisters on a remote island whose lives are changed when a strange government official arrives to try to evict them, won the Innovator Award in the festival’s Next section.
Other films that won audience awards included the documentaries “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez” about the pioneering playwright and screenwriter, and “One in a Million,” which chronicles a family’s journey from Syria to Germany and back over 10 years.
The festival previously awarded Andrew Stanton’s “In the Blink of an Eye” the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Award, which celebrates outstanding films representing science or technology.
High profile Sundance films such as Olivia Wilde’s “The Invited,” the bizarre horror “Leviticus” and the Charli XCX film “The Moment” did not premiere in competition and were not eligible for jury or audience awards.
The Sundance Awards can sometimes be the first stop for Oscar nominees and winners, which was notably the case with “CODA” and “Summer of Soul.” Documentaries have a better track record of reaching the Oscars stage than narrative films. 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 two others were among the festival’s favorites, “Come See Me in the Good Light” and “The Alabama Solution.”
Last year’s US Dramatic Grand Jury Prize went to the war satire “Atropia”, while the Audience Award went to Dylan O’Brien’s dark comedy “Twinless”.
The Sundance Film Festival runs through Sunday.
For more coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival visit: /hub/sundance-film-festival
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