Sundance film festival: taut and emotionally intelligent drama follows the aftermath of an eight-year-old witnessing a horrifying sexual assault

Josephine, the titular character of Beth de Araújo’s stunning second feature, is eight years old. Played by equally remarkable newcomer Mason Reeves, Josephine likes playing soccer with her dad Damien (a phenomenal Channing Tatum), with whom she is close – the film’s crisp, near wordless opening minutes, which shift seamlessly from Josephine’s perspective to third party co-conspirator, running with the pair through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, swiftly convey a tender, playful bond: supportive, teasing father and innocent child.

That’s about all we know of Josephine – all we need to know, really – before seeing the incident that ruptures her youth. Having run ahead of her father at the park, Josephine alone witnesses the brutal rape of a female jogger by a man in a distinctive aqua polo. Much to the audible shock of viewers at the Sundance premiere, de Araújo rejects the ellipsis now de rigueur in movies handling sexual assault, how much of post-MeToo cinema – Promising Young Woman, She Said, Women Talking, last year’s Sundance standout Sorry, Baby – have skipped over or elided the actual assault, de-emphasizing violence and allowing viewers to fill in the blanks.

Josephine is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

Sundance film festival: two teenage girls find their friendship put to the test in a witty and charmingly odd British comedy

If you know, you know that first best friendship is a world unto itself – lush, rugged and expansive, nutritive and intoxicating, vulnerable to freak changes in the weather. Its specific terrain stays invisible to outsiders; only the two within it know, and they themselves are likely to lose it in time. So goes the perilous trekking in Extra Geography, Molly Manners’ nimble and frequently funny debut film, which astutely maps the peaks and valleys of one charged friendship between two adolescent girls at an English boarding school.

Minna and Flic, played by remarkable newcomers Galaxie Clear (coming for Chase Infiniti’s name game) and Marni Duggan, begin year 10 sometime in the early 2000s, in a sunny meadow of boundless, heady entanglement. They move in playful unison, share beds and mannerisms, hold common goals (Oxbridge) and disdain (for boys, and those who covet them). Manners, a Bafta nominee for her work on the better-than-it-should-be Netflix series One Day, is particularly attuned to the energizing rhythm of platonic-ish intimacy; the first third of this brisk, 94-minute film is a mesmerizing symphony of female mind-meld, the girls slamming lockers, opening notebooks, flopping on the floor and hatching plans to a swift, synchronous beat.