Black Box Diaries

In her Oscar®-nominated debut, journalist Shiori Ito embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault.

Black Box Diaries is a daring work of first-person journalism, as director and journalist Shiori Ito, embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, launching the #MeToo movement and exposing the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems.

In 2015, Japanese journalist Shiori Ito was assaulted by prominent media executive Noriyuki Yamaguchi – a close associate of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. But in a country where the legal age of consent was 13 and sex-crime legislation dated back to the Meiji era, prosecuting – let alone winning – such a case was almost unthinkable. Undeterred, Ito went public in 2017, detailing her experiences in her memoir Black Box, and now follows up with her bravura and Oscar®-nominated debut feature Black Box Diaries.

Unfolding like a thriller and combining secret investigative recordings, vérité shooting and emotional first-person video, Black Box Diaries is her real-time investigation of her own sexual assault – and includes raw video diaries (shot on Ito’s iPhone), surreptitious audio recordings of police negligence, and vérité courtroom footage.

The inaugural winner of the CPH:DOX Human:Rights Award, as victim-survivor and as director, Ito gives powerful voice to her own life- and law-changing story – and hope to women everywhere.