Tokyo. Shiori Ito recounts how in 2015 she had a dinner with the powerful reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi talking about her potential new job, when she suddenly felt dizzy after a drink. A taxi cab drove them to a hotel. She fell unconscious, and woke up naked in a bed of a hotel room, with Yamaguchi naked on her. She left and filed a report to the police, but the indictment was withdrawn, possibly due to Yamaguchi's close ties with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Shiori insisted on the legal prosecution of her case for years, and wrote a book about it. As a journalist, she made recording of her conversations with an Investigator. Finally, the case arrives to a trial, and Yamaguchi is found guilty of rape.
A harrowing and disturbing documentary, "Black Box Diaries" is an unusual film where journalist Shiori Ito recounts and reconstructs her own rape, but does this with a journalistic distance which gives her some relief and objectivity to avoid (and contain) her own trauma. She secretly or openly films video or audio recording of witnesses (the taxi driver who drove Shiori and Noriyuki Yamaguchi when she fell dizzy; the phone call with the Investigator...), the clip of hotel camera footage of them leaving the taxi, or a woman reading Shiori's own testimony as a rehearsal for the trial (some 76 minutes into the film, which includes some graphic descriptions, such as the one where she woke up with Yamaguchi on top of her, and when she went to the bathroom, she noticed her "nipple was bleeding" and that she "had bruises") to combine them all into a chaotic, meandering, but honest and valuable testimony, creating a major catalyst for the advancement of prosecution of sexual violence in Japan. An especially unsettling moment is somewhere 57 minutes into the film, where Shiori reads an anonymous e-mail of a woman who berates her: "With the book, I am ashamed we belong to the same gender. Do you think you haven't done anything wrong? I was strictly raised to avoid such things." While this self-depicting approach is mostly just a primary source, it manages to create a fascinating film essay of the victim insisting on her rights and justice, exposing the often situation where an influential perpetrator knows powerful people, and is thus able to "cover-up" the incident, but not delay the trial at the end. It is a bitter and significant human rights work, and a one that shows Shiori's closure of this crime.
Grade:+++
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